


A Spoonful of Sugar

by Budinca



Series: #golubtsy [2]
Category: Yuri!!! on Ice (Anime)
Genre: Body Image, Character Study, Comfort, Cooking, Domestic, Emotional Mental Soliloquies, Established Relationship, Friendship, Living Together, M/M, Overly Fancy Descriptions, Post-Canon, Recipes, Stress and Stress Relief, The Ambiguous Existence of Victor's Relatives, Weight Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-10
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2018-10-02 06:26:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 48,967
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10211591
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Budinca/pseuds/Budinca
Summary: Victor stared at him, keeping the spoon steady in his hand. It reminded him, unexpectedly, of his grandparents, who, although they almost always cooked together, still insisted on letting one taste what the other was making on some particular occasion. For the first time in several weeks, Victor thought again:Wow, I’m really going to get married.Or. The miraculous process of Victor learning how to cook, in short installments.Feat.comfortable clothes, Victorvery muchcooking, Yurio cooking, Yuuri cooking, Yuuri's mom helping with the cooking, Chris being a cooking muse and advisor, various people (but mostly Yuuri) trying out the results of the cooking, and suspiciously vague and artistic descriptions of ice skating.





	1. February

_It is ever so much easier to be good if your clothes are fashionable._

\- L. M. Montgomery

It all attempted to start one fine morning, when the overnight rain had only left a thin layer of clouds for the sun to scatter around before sending white dollops of light through the apartment’s windows. There were seagulls, even here, their cries blending with the dim sound of traffic, and all somehow still resembling silence. From the noise, they were probably resting up on the roof.

Inside, however, it was quiet, the world muffled behind wide windows and white walls and thin draperies. That sense of reality which still survived inside was held in check and distributed in small doses by the ticking of a wall clock, the drip of a faintly faulty faucet, the occasional puff of a room freshener, the calm breathing of three sleeping bodies. _Nearly_ sleeping, as one was visibly running after hares in its dreams, and another was just now blinking himself awake.

Despite the lack of movement, tiny specs of dust could still be seen glittering in the rays of sunlight, and Victor concentrated a bit on those as his eyes adjusted to the idea of morning and wakefulness in general. Another burst of seagull cries welcomed him back to the world. Definitely nesting on the roof, Victor thought, closing his eyes and pressing his face into the pillow once more.

Makkachin was half lying on his feet, which was very thoughtful of him, as otherwise Victor’s feet would have been freezing by now. He had a feeling the blanket distribution was no longer quite equal on this bed – and that was quite impressive, seeing as his blanket was massive. Victor’s fingers twitched once, and he felt a whisper of a touch against them. Opening his eyes again, he gazed at Yuuri’s hand, less than a hair’s breadth away from his, and then raised his eyes a bit to see his face. Still fast asleep. Well, nevertheless – Victor pressed his hand into his anyway, both warm and calloused and slightly red with scratches from falling on ice.

In just a few weeks, Victor had spoiled himself rotten with mornings like these, when he’d just – he could almost see himself doing it now too – lean forward into Yuuri, and both of them would be soft with sleep and relaxed, and they’d pull each other close, grasping hands and tangling feet as they woke up. And yet, it wasn’t often that Victor found himself _fully_ awake before Yuuri. He thought he ought to do something with the opportunity. A most regrettable inspiration, as it made him turn away and sit up, pulling yesterday’s hoodie from where it had halfway slid under the bed.

Victor hadn’t been born a morning person, but he was self-taught. Still, it was with reluctance that he dared, once he’d pulled on the necessity hoodie, to look back at where Yuuri was still sleeping deeply, half his face pressed into the pillow, hair pushed in every direction. He truly _had_ a noticeable case of bed hair, now that gravity had more to work with. Victor hadn’t been surprised to find that out, but he’d been delighted all the same. And there was even Makkachin up on the bed, still sleeping at his feet, to crown it all, and make Victor question even more seriously his decision to get up.

But get up he did. Now. In this precise moment.

He pushed himself up from the side of the bed and – raised his eyes to the white ceiling, letting out a soft, but resolute sigh. His feet still hurt like hell; he thought he’d got over this. Well, among other things, he’d also thought he’d kept himself in relatively good shape during the year he’d taken off, but Yakov had been quick as lightning to show him that he, in fact, hadn’t. And hadn’t that first month of training been torture – a constructive, well-meant, and well-deserved torture, but torture nonetheless. It had been as nostalgic as it had been horrible, and Victor had been glad that Yuuri hadn’t been there to witness it. In the short moments interspersed in between the decidedly longer ones in which he’d yearned for him with all the strength he had left, that is.

Nevertheless, he swallowed down the pain now and took the few steps necessary to get out of the bedroom; there, he once again became aware of the downside of having a particularly well-lit house: the warmth went right out, just as the light came in. Victor pulled the hoodie closer to himself – and really, it _was_ Yuuri’s, wasn’t it? It was very loose, and Victor had never had the good mind to buy clothes that were unfitting in quite such a comfortable way. He’d been missing out. – and trudged onwards, towards the kitchen. His feet hurt in a deep and almost dull way, but at least the dressing kept him from feeling the coldness of the floor directly on his skin.

A longing look was sent towards the coffeemaker, but Victor was feeling altruistic today, so he chose to first inspect the fridge. There was, well, more than there used to be in past years. More sustainable food, and less fancy, gourmet, bite-sized things he’d acquired at a ridiculous price in some central supermarket. They had eggs, for one thing - normal, trustworthy eggs.

So, Victor took out four of those and swiftly made two servings of scrambled eggs before he could remember that he didn’t, in fact, know how to cook. He even tentatively poked a fork at one of them before setting them on the table, and tried it out. They didn’t even taste half-bad, if slightly under-salted.

 _Huh…_ , Victor thought, turning back to the coffeemaker, and letting it work while he also attempted to improvise two small bowls of salad. _This doesn’t seem so hard._

 

Here’s the thing: Victor hadn’t exactly been spoiled as a child. At least, not for many years. It was just that his family had lived close enough to his grandparents’ house, both of whom didn’t need to be asked twice to help in the kitchen, and he’d been blessed with parents who, whenever they weren’t too busy, became doting in the purest upper middle class fashion – by spending a lot of money on otherwise everyday things. His mother had no qualms about ordering food whenever nobody had had the time to put a meal together, while his father would have done anything just to avoid using the oven.

That was another story:

“What about your dad?” Yuuri had asked at one point, shortly after moving to Saint Petersburg. He’d given up on not sounding curious after Victor had just related another kitchen mishap of his mother.

“Oh,” Victor had smiled. “Father would sometimes bake a simple pie or something, but he wouldn’t touch the stove either. Nana had scared us both off it, each in his own time.” Yuuri here raised both eyebrows, which had made Victor grin inwardly and step his act up a notch. “ _Vityusha, your grandfather lost his left thumb cutting tomatoes into borscht_ ,” he said, changing his voice so suddenly that Yuuri had to bite at his lips not to start laughing. “At which I would say, _I thought it was in the army_ ,” he continued in his normal voice. “But she’d say, _No, it was borscht!_ ” Again, in that peculiar voice, watching as Yuuri subtly raised a hand to his mouth.

“And your grandfather?” he asked, using every ounce of control to keep his voice steady.

Victor grinned. “Grandfather loved to go along with it. I heard him tell the story a hundred times, and it never quite matched the one he’d said before. It would start with the carrots, and then the parsnips, onions, and much later, when he’d get to the tomatoes, he’d start counting. One,” Victor started counting on his fingers, his grin a dazzling thing. “Two. Three.” Yuuri was quietly chuckling by now. “Four. Five. Six.” Victor pulled his hand away from his mouth. “Seven.” He ran his thumb over Yuuri’s knuckles. “Eight.” He found his ring, turned it a bit on his finger. “Nine.” He pulled him closer. “Ten.”

And kissed him. Incidentally, it had also been their tenth kiss; not that Victor had been counting or planning it or anything like that.

Therefore, Victor had never really felt compelled to learn how to cook – or to _practice_ it, since both Yurio and Yuuri seemed determined to believe that nobody was totally inapt at it. It couldn’t be too hard, right? Yurio was great at it and he was barely sixteen. At sixteen, if he remembered correctly, Victor had mostly been a pain in Yakov’s side and, whenever that wasn’t the case, out exploring whatever cities his competitions bore him through with whoever he found most interesting on a 2-mile radius.

But those were stories for another time.

 

When he’d finally moved alone – first, away from his grandparents’ house (“ _Of course you can’t live alone as you like in your home just because your parents are busy overseas, you must come and stay with us, you’ll see we can all fit in three rooms.”_ ), and then away from the roommate accommodation Yakov had provided for him when he first started competing seriously _(“Okay, I get that you’re young and kind of a genius, but can you stop coming in at 2 am laughing your ass off?”_ ) – he’d taken one look at his kitchen, deemed it appropriate, and then went back to enjoying the sheer emptiness of the place. Had he still been in the mood to go on late-night outings with people, he would have rejoiced, but as he had been then, just turned twenty and with Makkachin freshly recovered from his grandparents’ place, he’d just let himself soak in the silence and slept for six hours on end, in the middle of the day.

That was not to say Victor despised the idea of cooking, or was stubbornly refusing to learn. Nothing like that. In fact, even now he had a few clippings of recipes he had stumbled upon in magazines at one point or another. He’d thought, _Oh, this sounds interesting_ , and drafted them for a freer day, for a more patient day, for a day he’d feel adventurous in a rather domestic way. These hadn’t come, or, if they had, he’d already lost momentum by the time the necessary grocery shopping was over. Hope hadn’t been lost, though; another day would surely come.

And now, he seemed to have dozens of them, scattered in between the late-winter and spring competitions.

When he’d seen the table laid for breakfast, Yuuri had blinked an inordinate amount, and then adjusted his glasses before asking Victor, in that quasi-sarcastic voice he sometimes had and which Victor was thoroughly weak for, whether their building had suddenly developed room service overnight.

It had been more than enough incentive to try again. But, now, Victor wanted to make something just the slightest bit more impressive, and he was just thoughtful enough to seek Yurio’s help before he risked burning something (his house) or someone (himself). Regrettably enough, since Victor couldn’t think of _everything_ , he’d chosen to do this at the ice rink.

“Listen, just because you can still flawlessly land all your quads after bunking off for a whole year doesn’t mean we mortals have to suffer for it,” Yurio told him, in a sentence that began before Victor had even finished skating to his side and finished when Yurio had finally managed to open his water bottle.

Victor smiled, that wide, self-pleased smile which hid the knowledge that the bruises from the last falls he’d practiced in private were still a long way off from fading. “What would you advise me to make for dinner?”

Yurio’s lowering hand was like a lever for his arching eyebrow. “ _You_?” Victor raised his own eyebrows in a show of defiance to that tone. Yurio scoffed. “Instant tomato soup.”

“Now, that’s not helpful at all,” Victor sighed, and turned and leant back into the barrier, looking over the rest of the rink.

Georgi had been practicing a new choreography ever since after Russian Nationals, and everyone around seemed relieved he’d chosen a less – _specific_ theme this time (although Victor was kind of sorry he’d missed seeing their reactions last year). There were a couple new faces around this time too, Juniors recently taken under Yakov’s wing, but who, proof of Yuuri’s downtoned attitude catching up to him, had given him a particularly good impression by not flocking around him even once.  Then, at the far end, there were Mila and Yuuri, looking deep in talk with Yakov. Victor mildly wondered what that could be about.

“Nothing?” he asked, not turning his head.

Yurio made an impatient noise. “You’re still here?”

Victor sighed again, although his heart was not in it, and glided away, hoping that some spins would clear his head – or at least rattle some ideas into it.

Victor adored ice skating. He couldn’t believe he’d almost forgotten that over a year ago, when he’d been caught in a death spiral of imperfect combinations and unfinished choreographies inside his own head. It had almost got to the point where the only thing he told himself upon hitting an impediment had been _don’t_ , and nearly believed that it would work.

No, Victor loved ice skating, passionately, especially when it was _this_ – the glide across the centre of the rink, his fingertips and nose cold and red from hours of practice, the movements easy in his mind, slipping into one another on a path that was both surprising and utterly known to him, following each other on a well-defined line, to a much-expected climax and denouement. Each imperfection, each under- and over-rotation just a promise of a time, further ahead, when they’d all be perfect, perfect, lights shining over him and over the thousands of sharp paths made on the ice all around him.

It had hurt, at first, to give his programmes away into foreign hands, to see them performed not as he’d envisioned them, but not in a wrong way either – differently, personally, slowly becoming someone else’s instead of his. His own promise of perfection tied up and given away. It had hurt, but, oh, how much it had given back to him later, tears of pain and disappointment but also of joy, utter joy and triumph, and lastly, _look, here’s something else you can do, and it’s just another way to touch people’s hearts_.

He’d always done things on his own, sharing them with everyone else on a glittering moment of elation and light. But now he’d been sharing them from the beginning, every trip and fall and bad landing etched into someone else’s soul too, and then that glittering moment that made them both soar up, up, so high that they’d been able to latch onto their very dreams before they could get too far away for them to reach.

Draw your path in chips of ice, soar high and take a bite of your dream before it can think of flying away from you – that’s what Victor had believed for over a decade of his life.

It had been both strange and dizzying to find that he’d got that same feeling from a fall, too.

 

“Did you find a theme?” Georgi asked him when he was done.

Victor was just the slightest bit dizzy, the effect of too much effort on a nearly empty stomach. What had started as various spins had developed, he realised, into a full half-programme, and he could feel a few pairs of eyes still stuck to the place where he’d ended it. He blinked, and ignored them further.

“Theme? No, not yet,” he admitted, pushing his hair back and distancing himself from the centre of the rink.

There had been no time to put together and practice a completely new choreography before Russian Nationals, so he and Yakov had just made a few adjustments to some old programmes and they went with that. They had gone well, too, just the right amount of old reassurance and new possibilities to ease Victor back into competitive skating, although he hadn’t, really, been that far away from it all this time.

He’d been assiduously working on something else for _Worlds_ , however. It was not nearly complete, not nearly there, but Victor had taken grasp of a feeling and sometimes that was all he needed to get started. All that was left to do was hold onto it and not let go, as he added brick after brick to its foundation, turning it into something secure and real.

However, as themes went, he wasn’t really sure what it was all about, concretely. _Life_ , mostly.

His eyes sought Yuuri again. He was closer now, absently leaning into the barrier, his own eyes a bit unfocused, a bit serious, like when a thousand gorgeous ideas were stampeding through his mind. Then, his gaze met Victor’s, focused once more, and he smiled, with the afterglow of all these ideas still imprinted on his face. Victor smiled back – what else was he to do? – and went to retrieve his water bottle, dizziness almost gone, but not quite.

“Since we made the groups smaller, the schedule is more flexible, but there has been a need for ballet instructors which we have just recently solved,” Yakov was saying, his tone made crisp by the English he used around the rink.

“Right, and ma’am Lelikova retired to Chile last year, didn’t she?” Mila asked, then succumbed to a full body shiver. “Her regime was rough, I’ve never been able to recover,” she then explained to Yuuri.

“And that’s why you’re good now, you ungrateful girl,” Yakov rumbled in that stern voice that had always made Victor fight to hide his grin. “You,” Yakov said afterwards, a bit louder, so that Victor looked up from where he’d been idly listening in. “Your first two spins were wobbly, work on that.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Victor said, snapping the lid back on his bottle.

Making it look as if the words hadn’t been instant icicles of frustration piercing him head to feet. He’d been coached by Yakov for over a decade, though, which meant that they each knew when they ought to push and when to step back; not that they always followed that instinct. Now, however, thankfully, Yakov stepped back, going back to making the rounds around the rink. Victor followed him a bit with his eyes. Mrs Lelikova hadn’t been much older than Yakov, and now she was probably enjoying her retirement on a sunny beach with umbrella cocktails and giant sunglasses. He wondered whether, at Yakov’s age, he would still be able to keep his steps so firm, to care so much.

Softly, almost tentatively, Yuuri leaned against his side, shoulders touching. Victor blinked himself back to the present moment and put his bottle away. “Have you ever tried teaching the Novices on these camps?”

Victor let out a soft laugh. “Me? Yakov would not let me touch them with a ten-foot pole. Says I’m a chaotic and unreliable influence.”

Yuuri pushed him a bit harder, but still remained at his side. “Don’t say that, you’re still my coach.”

“His words, not mine.” Truthfully, Victor had found being an episodic muse and adviser much more entertaining than the actual thought of teaching anyone. The sheer devotion and single-mindedness of his choice to become Yuuri’s coach had taken him, in the first several weeks, completely by surprise. “It would be as bad as making them learn from Yurio.”

“Mm,” Yuuri made a noncommittal sound. He fell silent for several moments. “Yurio would be a pretty good teacher, though. I think.”

Victor thought about it too. “Yes.”

For all his temper tantrums and aggressive replies, Yurio seemed to take Yakov and Lilia’s advice into consideration almost constantly. In that respect, he was miles apart from Victor, who took them more like directions than fixed courses to follow. Maybe that’s why he had trouble cooking, too; following every step of the recipe seemed overly tedious.

He let out a sigh. He felt like lying down on the floor directly outside the rink _. I grow old, I grow old, I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled._

“Are you okay?” Yuuri asked him. “You look a little pale.”

Victor, still looking at a nondescript point on the floor, tilted his head to the side. He thought. “Hungry.”

Yuuri turned to look over the wall clock they had installed six years before on one of the rink’s walls. His hand reached for Victor’s shoulder, travelled to his back, resting reassuringly between his shoulder blades. “I think we can go have lunch. We’ve been here long enough already.”

Objectively, Victor knew he was right. _But his spins were wobbly_ , he remembered. He put on his brightest smile, despite knowing that Yuuri had long since become able to see right through it. Victor had an image to uphold.

“Ten more minutes,” he promised.

Yuuri rolled his eyes, his hand leaving Victor’s back. “Don’t make it twenty.”

He didn’t. He made it thirty, and then was strictly forbidden from getting into his own car before he shoved at least one full nutrition bar into himself.

 

“What does sautéed mean, exactly?” Victor asked on another day, once again barefoot in his kitchen. He’d found an old newspaper clipping at the back of a cupboard while cleaning it up.

The TV was on, for once, and the mellow, rhythmic tone of a Russian documentary filled the room, alongside the heavy downpour from outside, big drops of rain splattered on every window. Yuuri and Makkachin were on the couch, and Yuuri was petting Makkachin with one hand as with the other he flipped through their plans for their separate programmes for the _Worlds_. He also seemed to be listening to the documentary, as he looked up every now and then when an interesting wild fauna fact was announced, something that Victor, owner of an overachieving, easily distracted, but nevertheless one-track mind by nature, found very impressive.

“Fried, but not by using a lot of fat,” Yuuri became even more impressive by answering him. He was sitting half-turned on the couch, so he only had to turn his head a bit in order to look at Victor. “It’s the one where you go –,” he let go of Makkachin and shook the choreography sheets as one would a pan, in quick and successive bursts.

“Ah, I see,” Victor said, and put the clipping in a more accessible place. He thought he’d seen Yurio do that at some point. It had looked interesting, but he’d mostly thought it was just for show, not part of the actual technique. You learnt something new every day.

“Why?” Yuuri asked, turning back to their programmes.

“No reason.” Victor shrugged, mostly to himself. He padded the way to the back of the couch and let his hands go instinctively to Yuuri’s shoulders.

He didn’t tense up, like he used to, the first couple of times, before he’d actually realised that Victor knew what he was doing. Victor did, of course. He hadn't been a professional athlete since before he’d hit puberty for nothing, after all. Moreover, he was a very dedicated individual, in general, so he’d always been keen to learn what other people did around him.

The rain was very thick outside, louder than they’d had so far, but it was pleasant, in its own way. It made the space they were in seem very small, but, this time, it was not uncomfortable, but cosy. A safe haven, blooming with warm light and smelling like over-brewed black tea, in that moment. The narrator on the TV said something about foxes, and how they kept alive and safe even in the darkest of winter.

“Let’s stay home for a week,” Victor said, softly, prompted back into Russian by the TV programme. He bent a bit over the back of the couch and pushed his face into Yuuri’s hair too, as he did, to emphasize the goodness of his point.

“Mm, I wish,” Yuuri said, leaning back and raising a hand to blindly touch Victor’s cheek.

They both wished it, but not really. Victor knew, and he knew that Yuuri knew too, that they were both too perfectionistic to miss practice for that long, especially during the season. They were both sore losers and ambitious against their better judgement, and their minds stayed fixated on every mistake they made until they found a way to remedy it. Victor had thought about it, but he hadn’t truly realised just how alike they were, before he’d gone back to competing too.

Therefore, it was the thought that counted, here.

A week alone, a week only for themselves. A week of lazy mornings and late nights and afternoon naps and dog walks in the park, of drinking coffee on the banks of the Neva, of Victor eventually learning how to make at least three different types of brunch. A week of it, a month, a year.

 _Man, I really want to go on a holiday_ , Victor thought, starting to play a little with Yuuri’s hair. There it was: an idea, a start. He’d think more about it after their next competition was over, though.

 

Then, one morning, the solution to his biggest problem hit Victor almost by mistake. It was just a bit over 7 am, and the drizzle which had accompanied him as he’d jogged away from home and up to the banks of the Neva had just transcended into a more violent kind of rain, making Victor abandon his pride and run to the shelter of a bus. It was a ten-minute ride to his apartment, and he’d spent most of them looking over his newsfeed. It was, really, pure chance that his eye had been caught by a certain article just in time for him to skim it and then get off the bus one stop early, for an emergency grocery trip.

He got back home by half past, moist from head to foot, but nonetheless excited and full of healthy determination. It was also lucky that Yuuri, for once, was so utterly overcome by his bursts of night-owlishness that he had yet to wake up. In short, Victor had the entire kitchen and living room to himself, once again. He’d known another day would come, and he hadn’t even had to wait that long.

So, Victor warmed himself up in the shower, changed into soft, dry clothes, and went to look over his bounty. The grocery shop had been blissfully empty at that hour, and he’d been able to glide in and out of aisles without catching too much attention, no matter how much he went back and forth between ingredients. He’d got more eggs, fresh bread, some smoked salmon, and a stick of butter, the last of which he couldn’t remember the last time they’d had any in the house.

Then, he set his phone aside, recipe and instructions at hand, and cut four careful slices of bread. Then he cut another one, just as a test probe. After setting those on the oven grill (and storing the rest of the bread in that way Yuuri had shown him, so that it would last them longer), he quietly dug around the cupboards for a frying pan that would suit his needs, and then set it on the cooker. As mentioned, Victor wasn’t an expert in butter, so he could at best approximate what the necessary amount of it looked like, so he only added three teaspoons of it in the pan before putting the rest in the freezer.

“What’s next?” he said, thumbing through his phone as faint fizzling sounds started forming in the pan. Right, eggs.

Victor chose to use the purple plastic bowl Yurio had once used for making blini batter, and he was just on the point of breaking the first egg into it when he caught a strange whiff. He sniffed, and then looked behind him. The butter was not fully melted yet, as it had been quite frozen, but it was well on the way there, and it gave off an aroma that was equally strange and familiar. Still, Victor looked around. He wouldn’t want the smell to linger for days, or to risk having it wake Yuuri, by some inconceivable means. He turned on the oven hood.

Also not wanting to risk actually _burning_ something, he made quick work of breaking and whisking the eggs in the bowl. Then, he poured them without hesitation over the bubbling butter and quickly got to his knees, to turn his five miraculous slices of bread on the other side.

“Spatula, spatula,” he then got back to his feet and twirled once around the kitchen in search of it. By the time he finally started turning the eggs around, his breath was just the tiniest bit shorter. Who’d known cooking could stand in for a workout session?

As he turned bits of egg around with one hand, he scrolled on his phone with the other. Intriguingly, it said that he ought to undercook them a bit, since the remaining heat in the pan would take care of the rest for him. He wouldn’t have thought of that on his own. Still, he followed the advice and soon set the pan aside, turning off the cooker, the hood, and the oven.

Even more strangely, it instructed him to butter the bread now, which seemed a bit like overkill to Victor, but he did it nevertheless, taking the butter out of the freezer once more. As he was just learning now, who was he to judge recipes? Especially since they seemed to be mostly right, since, when he was done with that and he looked into the pan, he found the scrambled eggs wonderfully cooked.

He tried them out on his pilot slice, and deemed them more than adequate, especially with a bit of salt and pepper, so he soon draped the rest over the other slices too. The only thing that was left was the fish and the seasoning now, which took hardly any time at all.

At the end, Victor looked at the product of his endeavours with something akin to surprise. It looked _good_ , it looked like something he would have tried out even if somebody else would have cooked it. That was a quite new feeling of achievement. He kind of liked it.

To conclude, he took a picture of the breakfast plate, but decided to only post it later, after getting general approval for its palatability. Then, suddenly in a _great_ mood, he washed his hands and skipped back to the bedroom.

Makkachin raised his head when he came in, for once more of a morning bird than Yuuri, who only sighed a bit, mostly in his sleep, and turned his face fully into the pillow. Well, Victor couldn’t have that.

He checked his alarm clock. “It’s 8:20,” he said, kneeling on the bed. Yuuri only made a quietly distressed sound in the pillow. Victor draped himself over his back. “It’s so _late_ , and Yuuri Katsuki is late for practice, the end of the world is surely near,” he wailed in a whisper into his shoulder, then kissed the back of his neck. “What are we going to dooo,” he continued, in the same tone, and Yuuri’s shoulders shook a bit. “I made breakfast,” Victor said, in his normal voice, pushing himself up.

Slowly, but surely, Yuuri turned himself on his side. “Really?” His hair was a lovable mess.

“Yes, really,” Victor grinned. “Come and see.”

Yuuri blinked a couple of times, then squeezed his eyes shut and stretched without getting up. “Okay, just – can I take a shower first?”

“I’d say yes, but,” Victor mused, “it’s getting cold.”

In the end, he managed to pull Yuuri out of the warm confines of the bed and barefooted directly to the dining table. Yuuri had seemed equally surprised by the aestheticism of the meal, which was something nice to have in common, although it didn’t speak wonders of Victor’s cooking prowess; but, when he’d finally picked up a bruschetta and bit into it, his face had melted into something quite unreadable, at first. By the third bite, however, Victor could properly categorise it as _bliss_. It was what he’d felt when first trying out Yuuri’s mom’s cooking.

“This is so good,” Yuuri whimpered, looking at the last bite of bruschetta he had in his hand. “What did you _do_?”

Victor shrugged, although he felt like going up on the roof and doing a joy dance. “Followed a recipe.”

“Oh, God,” Yuuri said, picking up a second slice as if it pained him to do so, but it would have been just as painful to leave it there. “This probably has loads of butter, doesn’t it?” he looked at it forlornly, but bit into it nevertheless.

Victor finally ventured to take a slice for himself too. “Not that much,” he said, although he couldn’t know. “Why?”

Yuuri just shrugged. “Just asking,” and gave in to the proper bliss again.

It was, all things considered, one of the most rewarding breakfast experiences of Victor’s entire life, up to that point.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Before and especially after you've read this, you might ask yourselves a number of questions, so here's to that:  
> 1\. Does the author have the slightest idea about how ice skating works?  
> Most definitely not!  
> 2\. Did the author purposefully ignore the existence of the Four Continents Championship because they forgot to mention it before and had absolutely no idea where and how to include it?  
> I most certainly did!  
> 3\. Is that much butter _really_ necessary?  
>  Several people apparently think it is.
> 
> Title from Mary Poppins, because what would a story of mine be without Julie Andrews?  
> There's some quote from _The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock_ there, at some point.  
>  Also, just in case this culinary masterpiece will stir your taste buds pleasantly, here's the recipe used in this chapter: [✪](http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/eggs-recipes/smoked-salmon-and-scrambled-eggs/)  
> Will update, well, probably bimonthly, whatever that might mean.  
> Cheers.


	2. March

Here was a thing about Yurio: he had a bicycle now. Granted, it was ostentatiously black, and the wheels bore some animal imprint which couldn’t have been cheap, and, most importantly, he’d only got it because he wasn’t allowed a motorbike yet, but he had one nonetheless. And it allowed him an ease of movement not found on public transportation. Victor suspected that was part of the reason why he was visiting so often now.

Not a particularly prominent part, though. The comparatively bigger one was currently busy making them some overly healthy milkshakes. Yuuri had confiscated Victor’s entire stash of almonds (half a bag) for it.

“Then she made us write a paper on nature symbolism. She expected us to write it _dow_ n, just like that! Who even has time to think about this stuff,” Yurio was complaining (rather mildly, by his standards) about his high school courses, while sitting on the floor and brushing Makkachin’s steadily fluffier ears.

Victor had seized a momentous opportunity, and had not been dissuaded or pushed away from it, so  he was currently sitting cross-legged behind Yurio, making some intricate braid of his hair. “It’s either love or patriotism. Find the most ostentatious thing, that’s either the muse or the country, and then just ramble away for half a page more.”

“You mean, bullshit my way through,” Yurio paraphrased, ever the mathematician.

Victor shrugged, adding one more pin under one of the braids. “Something like that. As long as you sound like you know what you’re talking about, you’ll do fine.”

“Speaking from experience?”

“Yes.”

Victor had pushed through both high school and university while being an overly active competitor. High school had been fun, because it had offered him several hours of interaction with people outside of the figure skating area, and an insight into what that might have been like. Plus, it had happened during a time when he’d been more understanding with himself, and his aspirations more open to compromise. Those had been the times when he’d exasperated Yakov by staying up late and coming up either too late or too early to practice in the morning.

Come to think of it, those had also been the only years in which he’d dated. Maybe he ought to have a talk with Yurio, Victor mused, humming a bit as he expertly twisted some of his hair.

“Just think of what it means to you, Yurio, and develop a bit on that. Or,” Yuuri stopped, giving the blender a few more shakes, “think of all you’ve been told in class, and try to recount as much of it as you can remember. It doesn’t matter if it’s a different poem, they’re usually taught by theme.”

Yurio inclined his head, making Victor click his tongue and gather the strands of hair he’d lost with the movement. “You’re saying I should just bullshit it, too, you just make it sound nicer.”

“ _Yes_ ,” Yuuri sighed. “That’s the whole point.”

Then, after high school, Victor had taken a year or so off and spent more time practicing, until something clicked, or something went out of one alignment and into another, and he’d decided that, for the time being, he ought to only focus on that.

College, afterwards, had been a blur, a few classes squeezed in between skating and ballet and choreographic choices. A few late nights spent studying for exams, because, just because his heart was no longer in it, it didn’t mean that Victor was ready to let himself fall below average.

Then he’d been done with the university too, and his five-year streak of gold medals started. It was as simple and as uneventful as that.

“Who has time for this,” Yurio muttered further, although in a lower tone, starting to brush Makkachin’s head just as Yuuri set three large glasses on the dining table.

“I did,” Victor lied good-naturedly, twisting a thinner braid into a thicker one. “It was quite fun. We had study groups, too. We used to meet at a café near the school.”

Mercilessly, Yurio scoffed. “I very much doubt you ever got any _studying_ done there.”

“How cruel,” Victor sighed, fingers working diligently. “Yuuri, what did _you_ do in high school?” he asked, and turned his head just in time to see him lower his phone from where he’d apparently just taken a picture of them.

“Oh, I don’t know,” Yuuri said, blinking contemplatively for a moment. “Stress?” he tried, turning back to his phone and typing away.

“You’re both no fun,” Victor declared, putting the finishing touches to Yurio’s hairdo. “Done.”

It took Yurio a few moments to register that he’d been addressing him. “What, really? That took ages.”

 _Not as much as it used to take when I did mine_ , Victor thought, and instead said, “Indeed, and you’re still not even _half_ done with Makkachin.”

Yurio hunched his shoulders defensively and went back to brushing. “Shut up, I’m being careful.”

He was. Maybe even too much so, since he was more used to his cat. Victor had seen her a few times, once a couple years before, and more often since he’d come back and gone to visit Yakov, who somehow still found himself in close enough quarters both with his temperamental new star student and with his illustrious ex-wife. Victor absently thought that, had he been the same as a year before, he would have found this predicament of Yakov’s to be the most amusing and interesting thing of the entire year. As he was now, it was astonishing how many more important things had insinuated themselves into his life in just one very short and very long year.

On the subject of important and inconspicuous things, he became aware that Yuuri had been silent for some time. “What are you doing?” he asked, pushing himself to his feet and wincing at how numb they’d gone while he’d been sitting on the floor.

Yuuri was still on his phone. “Talking to mom,” he said, then lowered the phone a fraction and shrugged. “And Minako, and Yuuko.”

Victor beamed. “Did you send them a picture of our Yurio being cute?”

Behind him, still half-buried under Makkachin, Yurio started making very loud and vociferous complaints at his remark, but Victor ignored them and skipped to Yuuri’s side, heedless of his numb and bruised feet now, just so he could look at what, for now, was still mostly indecipherable Japanese.

“You, too,” Yuuri admitted, showing him the picture he’d taken.

It was a rather nice snapshot of Victor, Yurio, and Makkachin sitting on the floor, in between Victor’s sofa and his coffee TV set, the unusually bright Saint Petersburg sky seeming to glow behind his three wide windows. Then Yuuri went back to his conversations, as if he hadn’t just made Victor feel like a fifteen-year-old all over again with just two words.

“And Makkachin,” Victor said, helplessly.

“And Makkachin,” Yuuri agreed, and gestured with one hand to the milkshakes he’d set on the table. “Help yourselves.”

Victor did, and tasted something which bore the allusion of almonds, vanilla, and, strangely enough, grains. He supposed that ought to mean it was healthy. Yurio came for his glass too, as soon as he could extricate himself from Makkachin’s loving embrace. His braids held firmly as he moved, which Victor took pride in. He’d twisted and turned them around each other several times in an attempt to hold up all of Yurio’s strangely quickly growing hair, and now it all resembled a very intricate sort of thing, with no end or beginning in sight. It clashed a bit with Yurio’s attire of jeans and that one sweater he’d bought in Japan, but that was alright. It was something worthy of an actual competition, after all.

“I don’t want you sending embarrassing photos to the only sane person I met in your town,” Yurio grumbled, aggressively choosing a colourful straw for his milkshake, because of course Victor had a full variety of those available in his kitchen. He kept them in a striped glass. _Splash of colour_ , he’d explained to Yuuri at some point, getting in return a look that had been as unconvinced as it was fond.

“It’s not embarrassing,” Yuuri said easily now, and turned to take another photo, this time of Yurio with a brilliant hairdo and a disgruntled expression as he slurped his drink through a purple straw. “This one might be, though, a bit,” Yuuri grinned, and easily ducked out of Yurio’s range when he tried to wrench the phone out of his hands.

 

If anything, the days remaining before the _Worlds_ Championship seemed both grotesquely long and mercilessly short; to Victor, at least, although Yuuri had complained a bit about it too, when they got home late at night, with sore feet and muscles, and almost too tired to even shower, to say nothing about having dinner. Yurio had been more focused lately, taking more leaves of absence at school, but even he had started grumbling about the remaining weeks they had in store. Mila and Georgi hardly ever stopped to talk to others during their training, too. And Yakov – well, Yakov was just as charming as always.

Victor knew his programme by heart, his and Yuuri’s and Yurio’s, and the most interesting parts of everyone else’s. Somehow, they didn’t turn to a jumble in his head; he’d had a lot of practice. It was all there, and he cradled his own routines like small, glittering stars in the palms of his hands. It was all there. For a while, he’d been worried – that nothing would ever feel complete again, that he wouldn’t find an idea great enough to encompass an entire skating performance, that he was, simply, spent. But here they were, his sparkling stars of wonder, pulsing and swaying to the beats of his chosen musical pieces.

What was his theme? they asked. It was this, all of it, awe and relief and hope and utter joy, layered over the nostalgic feeling of bad times past. _Wonder_. His Short Programme was a fluttering of sensations and unspoken words tied together with thin, silver strings, and following the movements of flutes and clarinets and a distant piano. It was all of Victor’s adoration, it was his _gratitude_.

Then, his Free Programme was a symphony; it could not have been anything else. The fluttery feelings of his Short bursting into bloom, his careful and seemingly delicate spins gaining intensity and confidence and purpose along with momentum. It was the feeling of winning, transposed into four minutes of unyielding choreography. It almost didn’t matter whether he was going to win or not, after skating that.

Almost.

Yuuri’s programmes weren’t like this, however.  Victor might have tried, might have prodded him with his own feelings, to see if they could also latch onto him, so they could have a beautiful, matching display on the ice, but it hadn’t worked. These were, after all, closer to last year’s routines than to the ones he was ready for now.

Yuuri’s skating this year was _vibrant_. It wasn’t boisterous or overly confident or wild, but it was still sublimely lively. It resembled a sudden splash of raw paints, compared to Victor’s watercolours. Pollock to his Turner.

There was such a powerful vivacity lying right under his skin. He was buzzing with it, but without becoming frantic. It was a rush of artistic adrenaline pulsing in his muscles, giving him just enough confidence to show himself as he really was, alive and excited and full of so much love for what he did. Victor had had a few sleepless bursts of creativity regarding all the key points of his choreographies, and he’d nearly wept for joy when he’d seen them work, when they fit so perfectly into the image Yuuri was creating on the rink.

 _Ah_ , Victor had thought. _I wish_. That was all there was to it. He yearned, and yearned, for so many little things. He thought that, when he’d been Yuuri’s age, he’d still had four consecutive gold medals waiting for him. He could hardly hope for that now. Still, he wished he’d had some sort of reassurance, then. It was a tiring process, skating every year, thinking it could be your last.

It had felt nice, in a bitter sort of way, to set that tiredness aside while he’d gone to coach Yuuri. It was as if he’d ended it on his own terms, instead of waiting for the news to catch him unawares, but nothing quite as drastic as that. As long as his body held, he could have gone back anytime. That was how he'd coped. But it had felt good to relax, if only for a little while.

However, Yakov had been right too. If he chose to go away for too long then, he could never come back. Victor had all the rest of his life to figure out whatever he wanted to do next, and do it too, but if he wanted one more standing ovation, one more glittering competition, he had to act _now_.

And here he was. Drained, but entirely pleased, catching his breath as he watched Yuuri go one more time through his Short Programme. He was entirely captivating, even with the music barely heard and dressed in dusty sweatpants and rumpled shirt. Victor could only guess what it would look like on an empty rink, with the lights glinting off the costumes that had yet to arrive.

“It’s peculiar,” he heard over his shoulder, so he turned a fraction, and saw Lilia, watching the same thing as him from outside the rink. “He’s completely different from Yura, and meant to stay that way, and he doesn’t have your ludicrous innate grace on the ice either. But,” she pursed her lips.

“But.” Victor grinned at her, and turned back to look at Yuuri.

He liked to get that reaction out of people, and most of them gave him what he wanted. Victor hadn’t been underestimated often in his life, but he thought, if he had been, that this would have been the sweetest retaliation he could have wished for. The sight of people rendered speechless by stunned and begrudging respect.

“He does something with it,” Lilia eventually went on, nodding her chin towards the point where Yuuri was just entering his last spin. “He makes it seem natural.” Victor felt her gaze piercing the back of his neck. “I’ll never understand how he does it, when I know your programmes are choreographed to the last mathematical detail.”

“Pure talent,” Victor said, easily, as if  he hadn’t heard anybody ever try to contest it.

Lilia made an impatient sound. “Spare me, you have plenty of that too.” There was another pause, while Yuuri finally got to his feet, breathed deeply, and looked at him for a verdict. Victor smiled at him. “Although your footwork needed some improvement, earlier,” Lilia finished.

Victor kept his smile on his face. “Thank you, I’ll keep that in mind.”

A few moments later, when he was once again alone, and still leaning back on the rink barrier, Yuuri skated to his side. “How was it?”

“Salchow,” Victor said, simply.

Yuuri sighed. “I _know_.” He glanced back at the rest of the rink. “Should I do it again?”

Victor looked at him then, calmly, eyes drifting over his sweaty, but still strangely pallid cheeks, his equally colourless lips, and the way in which his chest heaved as if it hurt him. “Not now,” he said. “Get some rest.”

As he turned his head back to him, Yuuri gave him an unimpressed twist of the mouth. “I’m okay,” he said, but then stopped and inspected Victor’s face a bit. “Are you?”

“I’m alright,” Victor said, keeping his arms crossed and looking at the rink. He almost skated away, but he kept himself in check. He glanced, hesitantly, from the safe distance of the centre of the rink, to Yuuri, beside him. “How’s my step sequence?”

He was being completely unreasonable and unprofessional, but this was the one bit of his personality that he'd never been able to reconcile with. It was a dangerous thing, as a certified athlete, to react so badly to criticism.

Yuuri only blinked once in surprise, still regaining his breath. “It’s good, but,” Victor closed his eyes, “you know you should not put so much strain on your left foot right now, I told you that bruise looked a bit worse than the others, and that you should let it heal a bit first.”

“Oh,” Victor said, opening his eyes again.

To complete the soothing sensation wriggling its way into Victor’s heart, Yuuri placed his hand on his shoulder, fingers making a few thoughtless, circling motions. “You know, it’s funny, but whenever I tried to overwork myself, Minako brought you into the conversation. _Of course_ you wouldn’t do that, so why do I risk hurting myself? I should follow your good example, since I admire you so much.” Yuuri smiled. “Then, here you are.”

Against himself, Victor smiled too. “Are you insinuating something, Mr Katsuki?”

“I don’t know,” Yuuri grinned. “It’s a distinct possibility.”

For a moment, Victor let go of his disappointed and bitter thoughts, and wondered whether he could convince Yuuri to take a bath together back at home. The onsen was something he missed almost constantly. Also, he’d been passively analysing the bathtub over the past few weeks, trying to figure out if two grown adults could comfortably fit in it, but he hadn’t got to any definite conclusion.

Well, nevertheless. They would probably be too tired to try it out, anyway.

 

Otherwise, they didn’t really know what to do with their free time, when they had it. Sure, they both had their own plans and ideas for what they could do once they had more breathing space in their schedules, but those were ambitious adventures (maybe finally finish one full tour of the Hermitage Museum) and journeys (take a one-day trip to Vyborg) for their less tired, future selves, and not for who they were at the moment, scratched and bruised and having trouble sleeping from the anticipative adrenaline for their next competition.

So, they took it easy. One Thursday afternoon, they impulsively drifted into a shopping centre. Their practice clothes and gear were back in Victor’s car, and they had given in and taken swift showers at the rink, but they were still, well, less put together than Victor was used to be when going shopping in his more pricey stores. Still, he didn’t let that detain him from pulling Yuuri into the miscellaneous shops he liked and propping various items of clothing against him. Yuuri, hair mussed up and dressed in  the _one_ large hoodie Victor had been proven to own (dug out from the very back of his dresser; Victor still failed to place where or whom he’d got it from), merely laughed tiredly and indulged him.

“It would be a shame to only get this for banquets,” Victor mused, holding a gloriously brick-red suit jacket against Yuuri’s chest. “We should go to more parties.”

“If it’s a party that asks for formal wear, I’m not sure I’d like to go to it,” Yuuri smiled nervously, took the suit out of Victor’s hands, looked at it, and put it back on the rack.

Victor couldn’t help the pleased smiled that formed on his lips as he started to slowly walk backwards along several shelves of clothes which probably cost more combined than his first apartment. The anxious attendants currently stealing glances at them from the distance had been dismissed with practiced grace.

“Does that mean you’d like to go to an informal one?”

He’d used his most charming and slightly teasing tone, but Yuuri simply glanced at him for a moment before shrugging and thumbing a few more jackets. “Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve gone to a few in college and they were alright.”

Victor thought about it too. He hadn’t really gone to any informal parties after he’d finished college. In fact, he’d already said that most of his social life had taken place in high school, so that was nothing strange. However, he was a pretty social creature by nature, so he’d never felt the particular need to skip any skating afterparty – and, since he’d gone to as many competitions as there were, that had resulted in many, many afterparties, so he’d had his fair share of polite talk and less polite gossip on background music.

But those weren’t like the ones he’d gone to in high school, in his first years of college. Free and open and full of possibilities, where the lights were dim and the music steadily louder and where nobody was asking Victor about his future plans while drinking champagne.

“What were they like?” he asked instead, as they were going out of the store. “The parties,” he clarified.

Yuuri inclined his head, seemingly searching for the right description. “Just various things Phichit happened to have heard of. Colourful,” he tried. “Loud.”

“Fun?” Victor ventured.

This time, Yuuri only had to think about it for a moment. “Yeah, I guess they were.”

Victor looked at him, and wondered. It hadn’t been his first, but he remembered having one of his first kisses at such a party. It had been something new and exhilarating and Victor had been sixteen or seventeen and still over the moon about his ongoing string of good performances in the Senior division. There had been no alcohol involved, because he wasn’t an idiot, but he'd felt like floating anyway. He mostly remembered the glowing, colourful lights behind the one he’d kissed, and the cheery song that had been playing then. Victor’s memory wasn’t that good, as a rule, but he guessed it must have been something pretty important in his development, since he still remembered fractions of it now.

“Oh,” Yuuri said, grabbing his hand through his shirtsleeve to get his attention, and pointed to a shop window across from them. “Look.”

Victor did. Neon animal prints were on full display on a variety of objects, from T-shirts to bath slippers. “His birthday was only last week,” he reasoned, then sneaked a glance at Yuuri, who raised a challenging eyebrow. “There’s still time for one more extra present, isn’t there?”

As if either of them could say no, when they had in front of them glow-in-the-dark blue leopard print pyjamas.

 

Another free afternoon found them in the same predicament, even after taking their time on the way home, driving through different parts of the city and then, at Yuuri’s request, also stopping to get some freshly ground coffee from one shop they’d found they liked, along with a small bag of toffees – a dessert which Victor had delightedly discovered that Yuuri relished, on the rare moments that they got any.

Victor took one of them out of the small paper bag now, as he leant heavily into Yuuri on the couch. His lower half had somehow become cocooned in one of the blankets he kept there, and which was full of Makkachin’s fur, as a consequence. Yuuri, propped in turn on a couple voluminous pillows, looked quite as content and toasty as Victor felt, and one of his hands was absently playing with Victor’s hair, which was – okay, it was as close to heaven as Victor had ever felt.

He pressed his cheek more comfortably on Yuuri’s chest. “Jogging today?” he asked, wanting instead to dream, but not daring to, before he knew.

Yuuri’s hand stilled for a second in his hair, a most sorrowful event. “No,” Yuuri eventually said, and went back to threading his fingers through his hair. “No, I don’t think so.” Victor sighed contentedly. “Do you think Makkachin will be satisfied with a slow walk around the block?”

As best as he could in his position, Victor shrugged. “Ask him.”

“I would,” Yuuri said, at which, just as a safety measure, Victor draped an arm around his waist, hand sliding securely in between Yuuri’s back and the couch, keeping him there. “But he’s too far away. He went to sleep on the bed on top of your pyjamas as soon as we were not paying attention.”

“Mm, such a smart boy,” Victor hummed, now ready to dream.

“Sure,” Yuuri said, with that affectionate tone that usually made most of Victor’s physical existence melt, and pushed some of his fringe out of his eyes. “Learnt from you.”

It was odd to think of it as it had been at the start, although, every time, the process made a lot of sense in the end. They couldn’t possibly say when they’d fallen for each other, not truly and not without a few months’ approximation, but what they could say was that it _had_ happened simultaneously, as they both came from different directions and on different tracks, facing different obstacles and roundabouts in their turn, until they looked around, at some point, and saw that they were nearly on the same track. Almost there. It had only taken another few brave, leaping steps.

What Victor had felt at the beginning had been what you felt when you saw something particularly soft or cute or squishy and you just had to – with a desire so powerful that it turned into a physical need – touch it, squeeze it, pat it and hug it and keep your hands on it for as long as it was necessary for the need to subside. It had resembled what he’d felt like when first getting Makkachin, or when he used to go to stationery shops just to try all their clay samples, when he was younger.

And Yuuri had been all that – soft and cute and squishy, and all the rest. At the beginning, at least, when his cheeks were just a little rounder and when he sometimes looked as if it would have been heaven to sink down into him, to hug him thoroughly, so soft and warm and near as he was. Victor hadn’t known what to think, then; his worldview was just getting readjusted to his surroundings and to the giant impulsive decision he’d made almost overnight. It had been a complicated, evolving feeling, which he had mostly tried to deal with by touch. It had been some time since he’d had such tactile urges towards someone, too.

Now, Victor almost couldn’t breathe, whenever he remembered how happy he was.

“What are you thinking about?” Victor asked, before he could be asked in turn. His hand had fallen asleep, so he begrudgingly pushed himself up into a more dignified position.

“Yuuko said she wants to throw a party when the triplets are done with their first year,” Yuuri said, pushing his fringe out of his eyes and rearranging his glasses. “I was trying to see if I remembered much of my first year in school.”

Victor hummed in acknowledgement, absently looking around his living room as he considered the idea. When he thought of grade school, the first thing that came to mind were his half-uneaten lunches, forgotten at the bottom of his backpack. That, and his grandparents rock-paper-scissoring each other to see who got to stay home and cook and who had to pick him up from school. Leaving home in the dark and getting back in the dark, in the dead of winter. The fact that they used to have a _ceramic stove_ in the classroom. All that, and the tightly knit galoshes he had to wear over his boots when the ice was too unforgiving on the road.

He related all this too Yuuri, in a more or less artistic fashion. “Also, picking up abandoned kittens or puppies on the way home. People knew what they were doing, they knew to always leave those cardboard boxes in children’s ways.”

“I once brought back a bird,” Yuuri mused, shifting a bit on the couch and laying his legs over Victor’s lap. “Mari helped me try to take care of it, but we weren’t very good at it, so mom had us take it to one of our neighbours. It got well, in the end.”

“Lucky,” Victor said. Most of his findings had been left to find their way back into the wild, at the back of his grandparents’ home. But that was a sadder sort of subject. “Any teacher crushes?” he therefore changed it.

Yuuri snorted. “ _No_ ,” he said, like the question was ridiculous.

Victor picked a few dog hairs off both their pants. “I had a few, when I was very little,” he said, and saw Yuuri’s gaze take a more serious tint to befit his answer. Choosing to take advantage of it, Victor went on with a tentative “Hey, Yuuri.”

At which said Yuuri raised his eyebrows a bit. “Yes?”

Victor turned a bit, so as to look at him better, although still keeping his legs over his. “You said you took a few months off to finish college last year, didn’t you?”

Yuuri blinked, mildly confused. “I did.”

“Why didn’t—,” Victor started, but unprecedentedly found himself needing to stop and make sure his words were arranged well. “How come you didn’t date anyone, at the time?”

The mild confusion from earlier got rather more pronounced. “I…don’t understand the question.” Strange, Victor had thought he’d been clear enough. “Why should I have?”

Well, that was a strange way of putting it. Victor offered him an articulate combination between a shrug and a shake of his head. “Because you had some time off?” he tried. “And it’s fun?”

Now, Yuuri shrugged too, pressing his lips into an undecided line. _Debatable_ , said his whole body language. “I didn’t really think of it.”

“Did you ever?” Victor asked, genuinely curious now.

Yuuri looked at him, a small frown on his brows. “Yes, of course.” But the frown passed and he shrugged again. “Not very often, though.”

Victor nodded; that seemed feasible enough. From the moment he’d first started getting to know Yuuri better, it had been obvious that Yuuri was not somebody who gave himself away easily. Despite his wobbly self-esteem and equally sensitive moods, he was always, almost instinctively, quite protective of himself. At the same time, Yuuri was a completely committed person, once he put his mind to something, be it his career or his life in general.

So, as Victor had seen across these first months they’d spent together, Yuuri didn’t really engage in casual relationships with people. Every single person in his life had a well-defined place in his heart, and he cared about them accordingly, and only the incessantly growing and shifting crowd of the skating community had made it possible for him to have something he could call _acquaintances_.

It seemed natural, therefore, that Yuuri hadn’t particularly dwelt on the possibility of forming a relationship, just because he might have “had time” for one. Victor, on the other hand, had only very rarely been as committed about another person as he was about skating. That had started to change, lately; he felt like he’d given away quite a few bits of himself to several people that year.

He might have spent too long cogitating on that now, however, since the next thing he knew, he was inspecting the fish-pattern on Yuuri’s socks while Yuuri was gently prodding him with his heels.

“What about you?” Yuuri asked, and it sounded like something he was in fact repeating.

Victor raised his eyes to his face and blinked. “Ah, well,” he smiled, looking away. “Not so much, after I started getting serious about skating,” he finally admitted.

“Weren’t you always?” Yuuri asked, but it sounded nice when he said it, which was also helped by the fact that his hand had drifted once again to Victor’s hair. Victor would have gladly let him do that for the rest of his life, going bald be damned.

He had to snort a bit at the supposition, though. “I wish. I used to give Yakov so many headaches before I advanced to the Senior division, and a little bit after that too, when I was still asking him to be my coach. I was, well…”

Truth be told, Victor was also rather protective of himself – or, at least, of that layer of himself which the media and the ones around didn’t know. That was not to say that he was chronically secretive or that he had a completely different persona he displayed in public. Not really – for the most part, what one saw was what Victor was: a cheerful, slightly arrogant, slightly lighthearted, and very ambitious young man. It was the less enjoyable traits which Victor kept in check.

He was inherently outgoing, and liked crowds and talking to lots of people at the same time. He liked getting to know people, and getting them to know as much of him as was pleasant. Nobody needed to know about the sleepless nights of endless practices and constant rebukes he directed at himself until his routine was perfect, perfect, perfect, nothing amiss and nothing lacking and nothing unworthy for anyone to see. After all, most days Victor himself wished he didn’t know about these things too. No, Victor liked being pleasant and having others be pleasant and pleased in turn.

“I was all over the place, truth be told,” Victor said, breathing out a laugh. “As most teenagers are, after all,” he shrugged.

“Not Yurio, though,” Yuuri said, smiling like he knew.

“Not Yurio,” Victor smiled too, because he also knew.

Victor had dated, several people even, gone on several dates in several places, mostly during his last couple of years of high school. It had been a fun thing to do, and he got to meet new people and talk about things he liked (because it was what he had in common with those that skated and a point of interest with those who didn’t), and he also got to try new things, most of them enjoyable too, and it had all been a pretty easy-going affair. A bit of something nice and fun to do on Fridays, after practice.

But he’d only just started competing Senior level, at the time – he’d been, what, sixteen, seventeen, maybe early eighteen?

The interest had died out in a casual and natural manner at some point, though. _Life and love_ , he’d amusedly thought, had been sufficiently nibbled at, for the time being, and he’d get back to them once this, what remained of his life on ice, was over. At the time, he’d completely refused to see the end of it in sight, but its apparent endlessness hadn’t bothered him at all. So, maybe, he could understand Yuuri, and his lack of interest.

“I guess, I went out with a few people, and we had fun, and then I stopped, thinking it could wait until after the important part of my life was taken care of,” Victor raised a shoulder. “I only won gold after that, so who knows, maybe I was onto something,” he grinned, and laughed a bit once Yuuri pushed his feet reproachfully into his thigh.

And then he’d woken up and looked around and saw that Georgi was not merely crying over a month-old relationship, but one that had lasted over two _years_ , that Mila was suddenly taking her own dates more seriously, and that Chris – _Chris_ – was in a long-term relationship, and he’d been taken aback.

It was supposed to be, he’d thought, a funny bit of conversation when his rinkmates were taking a break and needed something to talk about. He’d certainly never thought anyone was getting _serious_ about it. He couldn’t imagine why anybody (as busy as them) would need _that much_ entertainment. He almost hadn’t even felt the time pass.

He’d only gone as far as revealing part of this thought process to Georgi, one evening after practice, when they’d been left alone at a nearby pub. Georgi had looked scandalised, told him he hadn’t a romantic bone in his body, no matter how good his Axels were, and then even went as far as looking a bit sad for him. So Victor, of course, had taken that as a challenge – a season and a half later.

That was how _Stammi Vicino_ had happened, the most frustrating programme of Yakov’s career ( _You look completely generic, what are you even feeling?!_ or _Are you asking for help in a supermarket?!_ and, to crown it all, _Why don’t you ask Georgi for help?_ ). The routine Victor had practiced the most for, and the longest time in his life he’d even spent thinking about love. He’d pulled it off, in the end, but only because he was tired and fed up and, he grudged to admit, kind of lonely, now that he’d had to think of it, and never wanted to skate that cursed programme again.

How things changed, Victor mused. Georgi, for one, had come to him at the Rostelecom and told him he was taking back what he’d said about his lack of romanticism.

Yuuri was absently playing with one corner of the blanket Victor had pulled on himself. “I guess I never really got quite close enough to someone to actually consider it. Or, if I did, it was never like that.”

Victor thought about it for a moment, then leant his head to the side. “Was that a problem? I always thought that getting to know each other was the most fun part.”

Yuuri laughed a bit, then looked at him with a tentative smile, as if to see if he was being serious. Once he realised he was, he just shrugged. “I could never get farther than a friendly talk with somebody I don’t know well.”

“No?” Victor said on the same tone, prodding at his hand in the same way as he prodded at his mind.

“No,” Yuuri said, half-amused, as if he was indulging him by voicing seemingly obvious facts.

It wasn’t something Victor could completely relate to, but it was something he understood, all the more so after a year of knowing Yuuri. “Okay,” he said, easily, and refocused his attention on Yuuri’s legs, trying to ease some of the accumulated tension in his calves. To his credit, he only got a _few_ audible whimpers.

Then Yuuri nudged him a bit with his foot, playfully. “Are we now having that conversation we didn't have when you first came to Japan?”

“Maybe,” Victor grinned, tracing lines through the soft cotton of Yuuri’s sweatpants. “Do you want to hear about my first crush, this time?”

He’d been bracing for another shove, but instead Yuuri leant more comfortably back into the pillows, put one elbow on the back of the couch, and rested his cheek in his palm. “Sure, why not?”

 

Yuuri was also getting increasingly – and suspiciously – good at immortalising different moments in their lives in surreptitiously taken snapshots. It could have started when Mila, two days after finally finding out about Yuuri’s lack of social media presence, had insisted on (1) showing him the benefits of being an active semi-public figure, and (2) making him use his own phone when they took any kind of pictures with the ones at the rink. Still, it might have started a while back, when distance and differences in timezones had made sending photos almost a necessity, to keep the ones back in Hasetsu updated.

 _Or_ – Victor thought – it might have started when he’d first seen Makkachin in Russian sunlight, which made him into an irresistible photo subject.

The thing was, Yuuri would every once in a while surprise Victor by sending him an impromptu, but nevertheless quite charming picture of whatever had caught his attention at that particular moment. It usually happened when he went on walks alone with Makkachin, or while grocery shopping, or when he was the one spending a lazy evening at home, while Victor went on those walks or out running. At one point, he’d admitted to being tempted to make a separate folder dedicated to Yurio’s casual wardrobe choices, but Yuuri was still too nice to actually do it.

Every time he got the chance, Victor made a passing remark, on the lines of: “That one looks good, when are you going to post it?” At which Yuuri would huff or shrug or shake his head, and either put his phone away or raise it to Victor’s face for just one more picture.

Victor had no such qualms. His Instagram and a couple other social media accounts were full of skating and Saint Petersburg, lately. Pictures of Yurio making funny (angry or unimpressed) faces and being mimicked by Mila behind him, of Georgi making puppy eyes at Yakov whenever he refused another routine idea, of them all looking slightly groggy over their first cups of coffee, all these were peppered all over his most recent albums. To those were added, in quite a careful amount, as was obvious to anyone who actually knew Victor, pictures of Yuuri mid-sentence, mid-tying his skates, of Yuuri sitting on the floor back at the apartment, half-covered by an adoring Makkachin, of them taking a (family) photo with Yurio in the middle, late at night when they were getting back from some nearby restaurant. There were many others, kept safe in his phone’s memory, but Victor was just starting to enjoy privacy for once.

 

Chris truly _was_ , incredibly, in a committed relationship, but that hadn't made him any less verbose on the subject of other people's more charming aspects. As such, Victor had to wait ten minutes for him to finish waxing poetic about Yuuri’s thighs before he could actually get a word in edgewise. He agreed with every word, but that was irrelevant; Victor was on a mission, and time was of the essence.

“But tell me, why did you call?” Chris eventually stopped to ask, once Victor’s silence had got more poignantly expectant.

“Right,” Victor said, putting a jar of pesto sauce back on the shelf. “I want a good pasta recipe.”

“ _You,_ ” Chris said, “ _called_ me for cooking advice?” One didn't need to see his face to imagine it; hearing his voice on the phone was enough. “You once burnt an entire bag of popcorn, _while_ talking to me.”

“Everybody burns popcorn,” Victor dismissed the accusation with a flick of his hand, and kept on analysing the entirety of the pasta aisle. “Just tell me what ingredients I should get.”

“Well, a good amount of the best cooking cream you can find, to begin with,” Chris said, minimally. “Your nutritionist will have a heart attack.”

Victor ignored that last bit and looked up and down the overpriced aisle with a frown. “Shouldn't I start by choosing the pasta?”

“Not that important,” Chris succinctly brushed it aside. “Listen to me here, _I’m_ the one giving advice. Next, let's see, you'll have to walk me through the dairy products they have, choosing the cheese is most important. Then, some mushrooms, you can never go wrong with mushrooms.”

Victor almost resigned himself to this chaotic plan of action, picking up his shopping basket and turning to leave the aisle as Chris kept offering him different combinations to choose from. But, at the last moment, he ran his eyes once more over the bags of dry pasta to his right and saw some which sounded just funny enough, so he took those, without asking for permission.

“Talking about artichokes, you should've just _seen_ what we've had for dinner last night. It was a sight to behold, even if there were no candles involved,” Chris went on, while Victor just picked the fanciest-looking cream he could find.

“I’m sure, I remember when you prepared those fondant potatoes,” Victor said, turning in a circle, and going towards the vegetables.

“I'm touched. Those were a particular fond memory of mine. Okay, what about pancetta? This could work wonderfully with the right type of mushroom. Of course, only if your little special one doesn't mind any of the things I’ve named so far.”

“No, I...” Victor started, crouched in front of several boxes of mushrooms, but then looked up in surprise. “I sincerely don't know. Let's go with that one, though. What type of mushrooms?”

“See if they have porcini,” Chris instructed. “Are you out shopping alone?” he asked, rather amused.

“What do you think?” Victor asked, getting to his feet and dropping the mushrooms in his basket.

In fact, he’d left Yuuri to take Makkachin on one of their longer walks round the Tauride Gardens, seeing as they both seemed to enjoy promenades on cloudy days, and the weather was just starting to get warmer around this time of year. Victor might have joined them, as he often did, but he’d felt in the mood to roam the neighbourhood and to make dinner, so they had all agreed to meet back at home later.

With the additional time they put into practice lately and with how tired it left them at the end of the day, neither of them had particularly felt like going out of the house much, either in the morning or in the evening; so these small moments of being on their own were quite appreciated, Victor felt. Now, if only he could maintain enough energy and determination to actually go through with the entire dinner plan.

“How selfless of you,” Chris almost cooed. “Is this an apology dinner? Have you finally realised that your couch is much too small for an adult to sleep on?” Victor had _once_ made Chris sleep on his couch, during one visit, and he'd never stopped bringing it up ever since.  “In that case, I strongly suggest you get something from a luxurious restaurant, you don't stand a chance.”

“Thank you, I always hear such nice things from my closest friends,” Victor said, with dry friendliness, choosing some fresh herbs.

“I’m seriously only thinking of your own good. Unless,” Chris mused, “your illustrious fiancé is into pitiful displays, in which case I strongly urge you to keep doing whatever you plan on doing.”

Victor had no doubts that that would work, at least insofar as it would amuse Yuuri, had this been the case. However, as it was not, “We're not fighting. I just want to make dinner.”

“Oh, so it’s one that comes directly from the heart. Okay, let’s see. Have we chosen the cheese yet?”

With serious resolve, Victor picked up his basket and started walking in that direction. “No, but we are going to, in a moment.”

“Good, good,” Chris commended. “Pick some onions on the way, too.”

 

Later, on his way home, Victor had been inches away from texting Yurio to come over, but the latter had got ahead of him by sending him a short text telling him not to lock the door. So, when Victor finally entered his apartment, he took a moment to breathe in the silence and emptiness of the place.

It wasn't that Victor missed living alone. He’d had his more than fair dose of it before. It was just that the calm and quiet was so much more refreshing and light when he knew that it would soon be followed by pleasant chatter.

Also, Victor thought it might be a good idea to get his groceries in some sort of order before Yuuri and Makkachin (and Yurio) got home, just as a precaution, to show them that he had it all under control. Accordingly, he rolled up the sleeves of his sweater and set himself to work. He left the pasta, the cream, the vegetables, and the Italian bacon close at hand, on the counter, and placed the rest – various weird fruits Yuuri had been getting lately, a couple bottles of lemonade, a box of frozen yogurt – in the fridge.

Once that was done, and he looked around himself at what he had to work with, he came to a startling realisation – he didn't have all that much to do.

“Strange, if it had been this easy, I might have done this years ago,” Victor said to himself, searching for an adequate pot to boil the water in.

After sprinkling some salt and olive oil in it, he also took the saucepan Yuuri had once used for mulled wine and set it aside.

The mushrooms Chris had told him to buy looked nice enough, but he remembered Yuuri’s mom spending quite some time on washing and peeling when she used them, so he decided to do that too. Victor had no qualms in following good examples, at least in this aspect. He spent some good moments with only the quiet splashing of his hands in the bowl of water to break the silence, and by the end of it he realised he was perfectly tranquil. It was a nice and soft revelation, and he turned back to the cooker with a small smile on his face.

There, he poured some of the cooking cream in the saucepan, and thinned it a bit with some milk before adding the mushrooms. Now, he had to be careful. He knew, both from experience and from Christophe, that boiling milk was quite temperamental and likely to leave his kitchen in a sorry state if left unattended.

To pass the time, he turned on the oven and set to slicing the pancetta into thin strips. It wasn’t something Victor remembered eating, but that was never a problem. Once upon a competition, he _did_ remember trying fermented herring (quite enthusiastically, since he’d been in public). Not many things could top that, if he said so himself, and that hadn't even been a particularly bad experience.

He was just slicing the last bit of bacon, stirring the milk and mushrooms from time to time, when he thought he heard Makkachin’s happy barks through the window he'd left ajar.

Since the water was starting to boil right too, he carefully added the pasta and waited. Sure enough, in another minute, he heard Yuuri open the front door and come panting in, Makkachin leading the way.

“We decided to run on the way back,” Yuuri explained, short of breath and completely dishevelled, but happy and utterly lovely.

“How diligent of you. Makkachin, did you have fun?” Victor smiled, smothering the near physical urge to go and engulf his dog in a hug and several hundred pats. That would have to wait until he wasn't risking letting Yuuri down with burnt milk.

“He chased three whole squirrels,” Yuuri nodded.

He took off his wind jacket. There were several dusty paw marks on his pants, although they must have been older, since Victor could see none on his carpet, where Makkachin had gone with his favourite chew toy.

Then, Yuuri tilted his head to look over Victor’s shoulder. “What's that? It smells good.”

One thing Victor couldn't smother this time was his pleased smile. “Dinner. You'll see.”

“Do you need any help?” Yuuri asked, having mostly regained his breath by now.

“No, I’ve got it all under control,” Victor said, and stirred the mushrooms once more, for emphasis; they didn't have long to go, now. “You can go shower. Yurio said he'll be around sometime soon, too.”

“Really? Alright,” Yuuri said, with no apparent hesitation, to Victor’s profound delight.

Invigorated and happy with the more lively atmosphere, Victor bustled around for a short while, until he deemed it appropriate to take the creamy mushrooms off the cooker; but afterwards he _had_ to take a break before going on. He had a dog to pet.

So, he lovingly showered Makkachin in affection in the middle of the living room for a few minutes, until they were both even more ruffled and happy than before. Then, he gave him a few special treats – for special occasions – and went back to strain the mushrooms and set them aside to cool, as it only now occurred to him that he probably should have diced them beforehand. While waiting, he added a couple spoonfuls of flour to the milk and cream concoction and set it back on the cooker. Chris gave some strange advice, in Victor’s opinion, but he guessed it would be best to stick to his instructions, at least the first time around.

Yuuri rejoined him in the kitchen as the sauce was starting to thicken. “Pasta?” he asked.

“Yes,” Victor said, from where he was straining and pouring cold water over the pasta in question. “Pappardelle – have you ever heard of anything like that? It sounded so funny.”

“Well, maybe once or twice,” Yuuri said, looking over the half-empty bag of pasta. “And mushrooms?” he also asked, looking at the place where a few stray bits remained from Victor’s courageous dicing adventure.

“Yes,” Victor set the pasta in a large bowl and went to try the sauce one more time.

It seemed, well, thicker now, although he couldn’t really tell if it was done, so he used the oldest trick in the book, blowing over his wooden spoon a couple of times and bringing it to his mouth. It didn’t give him any conclusive results. However, before he could try it again, Yuuri silently angled his spoon away from him and tried it too.

Victor stared at him, keeping it steady in his hand. It reminded him, unexpectedly, of his grandparents, who, although they almost always cooked together, still insisted on letting one taste what the other was making every now and then. For the first time in several weeks, Victor thought again: _Wow, I’m really going to get married._ It kept slipping his mind. It kept coming back to him with a very fluttery feeling in his stomach and lungs.

“It’s good,” Yuuri said, straightening up. “I think it’s done, too. It just needs a bit of salt.”

Victor placed the spoon back in the pan and turned off the cooker. “Oh, of course. I _knew_ I was forgetting something.” He turned around, retrieving both the salt and pepper mills from the other side of the kitchen.

“No, it’s okay,” Yuuri said, watching him grind careful amounts into the saucepan. “I always forgot to add sugar when I helped mom make cake batter.” Then, after a pause. “It’s really good, though. I like the mushrooms.”

Victor filed that away for some other occasion – now, if only he wouldn’t forget. “Thanks. I asked Chris for a recipe, I figured he’d know best.”

“Really? I didn’t know. Does he cook?” Yuuri asked, leaning back on the counter beside Victor and watching him mix the sauce with the pasta and the sliced mushrooms and pancetta. When Victor made to add some more cream into it, Yuuri gently nudged the carton away from the bowl.

“He _dabbles_ ,” Victor said, with an amused eyeroll. “And he said to put as much of it as possible,” he added, signing to the cooking cream.

“Chris has a formidable digestive system, I don’t,” Yuuri explained. “And, I think, neither do you,” he followed, after a moment.

Victor shrugged, going back to his work at hand. However, he had to stop halfway through his mixing process because his gaze had just landed on the peeled, but obnoxiously uncooked onions on his left hand side. “Uh,” he said, because he could already feel the room get warmer from the oven which had been left on this entire time. “Help me chop the onions?”

 

That was how, several minutes later, Yurio found them mildly laughing, Yuuri’s eyes full of big tears that were forming rivulets down his cheeks, and which he unsuccessfully attempted to wipe on his forearm, and Victor a bit teary himself, keeping the frying pan at an arm’s length as he dropped the chopped onions into it.

Yuuri just offered him a “Hi, Yurio,” with a watery laugh before he ducked into the bathroom, which just made Yurio goggle even more as he veered towards Victor.

“Hello, Yuri–,” Victor started to say, but broke off in a string of short, but undignified sounds as the watery onions edged towards the oil, making it spatter around – including, on Victor’s hands.

Taking his jacket off slowly, as if still debating whether to stay or leave, Yurio kept staring at him. “What are you doing?”

“Cooking,” Victor said, after the spattering subsided and he'd schooled his features and pose into more dignified ones.

Yurio had circled the room until he’d put both Victor’s kitchen counter and his dining table in between them. “ _You_?”

Victor sighed, “Why does everyone keep saying that?” Bravely, he took a step closer to the cooker and picked up a wooden spatula.

“Hopeful denial, if I had to take a guess,” Yurio said, watching the frying pan. Victor gave him a displeased look. “Grandpa told me you once tried to make bread dough with a hand mixer,” Yurio continued, just as Yuuri came out of the bathroom, his eyes still a bit red.

“I’m not sure I heard that right,” Yuuri said, switching to his careful, but steady Russian at hearing both of them. After thoughtlessly ruffling Yurio’s hair a bit in greeting, as he also inspected Victor’s onion caramelisation process. “You should've worn an apron,” he said.

Retrospectively, Victor also thought that he should have worn one. There were no immediately visible stains on his navy sweater, but he didn't hold much hope for it at a closer look. Well, nevertheless, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

“It's alright,” he thus said, but Yuuri’s attention had already drifted to Yurio.

“I didn't know your grandfather knew Victor that well.”

Yurio was more passively than aggressively patting his hair back down. “He was neighbours with his grandparents before he moved to Moscow,” he explained.

“He used to play chess with my grandfather and tell scary stories together to the children who came to watch them,” Victor said. “Which brings to mind the obvious fact that I was _ten_ when making that particular mistake, so adjust your judgements accordingly.”

“Still funny,” Yuuri declared, going to pet Makkachin a bit and to put some order into the pillows and blankets that had amassed on and around the couch (As exemplified, they were all very comfortable creatures, and neither too tidy when busy or tired).

Meanwhile, Victor cared for his slowly browning onions. He turned them this way and that with the spatula, more to keep himself busy than to help the cooking process in any way, in his opinion, although he could vaguely remember his grandma doing it like this too. It smelt nice, though, and this time he didn’t forget to add a pinch of salt, even while listening to the others talk about who was going to compete at _Worlds_ and what they could do in the short time they would have to roam about the city.

When he thought they were nearly done, Victor set the flame even lower and twirled around, retrieving a slice of bread from the special place Yuuri had designated for it. He returned with it to the cooker, pushed the onions around some more, and took around a spoonful’s worth to lay on the bread.

“Here,” he said, leaning forward and offering it to Yurio, who took it with only slight surprise. Upon seeing Yuuri’s somewhat confused stare, he clarified, “It’s what grandma used to do,” at which Yurio, already in the process of taking a large bite, nodded in agreement. “Do you want some too?”

“No, that’s okay,” Yuuri said, shaking his head a bit, and came closer. “Are you almost done now?”

“Yes,” Victor agreed, turning off the cooker. “I’ll add this too and then leave it in the oven for half an hour.”

Years of dealing with the press paid off; he almost made it sound like he knew what he was doing. Even more than that, Yuuri seemed to believe that he did too, at least for now, since he didn’t appear to keep his phone at the ready, in case they’d need firemen or doctors in the immediate future. It made Victor feel a strange lot like a responsible adult.

Yuuri had sighed when he’d first tasted his pasta, that evening. Yurio had been peculiarly quiet. Victor had mostly held his breath, and attempted not to look like it mattered much to him. But then Yuuri took another careful mouthful of it, letting out a more pronounced sigh, and Yurio followed suit, although still silent. Victor was feeling cautiously optimistic.

“Damn,” Yurio eventually said, very eloquently, and Yuuri laughed in agreement.

“It's a bit scary,” Yuuri then said, with Yurio nodding along. “And slightly unfair.”

“ _Right_?” Yurio turned to him, frustrated.

Which was completely unreasonable, since it was Victor who was waiting for a definite verdict, and not them. He drummed his fingers on the counter, pointedly, to remind them of that fact.

Upon noticing that, Yuuri did look up at him, but he only smiled bashfully. “It's very…” he started. “Wait, just let me take another bite.”

“ _Yuuri_ ,” Victor complained, much to Yurio’s mean delight.

“It's very good,” Yuuri swallowed quickly, looking thoroughly amused. “Seriously.”

Once again, Victor kept himself from jumping for joy. He directed his gaze towards Yurio.

“It's fine, I guess,” Yurio said, just to be difficult, but held firmly to his plate when Victor made to take it away from him.

“Good,” Victor decreed, his cheeks aching a bit with how wide his smile was.

Of course, most of it found itself delivered in casseroles to Yakov’s place later, after the three of them had had an indulgent serving, but nevertheless, Victor magnanimously promised them that he’d try his hand at the dish once again at a later date, when no competition was pressing and guilt-tripping them too much.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Extra useful questions that have come up:  
> Who in their right mind lets athletes eat like this?  
> → Me, apparently. (peace sign)  
> Is Victor okay?  
> → Is he ever?  
> Also, why not just follow a recipe?  
> → I couldn't decide. Thusly, the recipe in this chapter is a mix of two, and here they are: [✪](http://www.marthastewart.com/336532/pappardelle-with-caramelized-onions-and) & [✪](http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/recipes/baked_pappardelle_with_21046)
> 
> Thank you so much for reading so far, and enjoy :)


	3. April

Although just a little over an hour long, the flight to _Worlds_ had been the ultimate feat of Yakov’s patience, though by no fault of his. All his skaters had just too much personality on their own, a fact which only got worse when they were held together in closed spaces.

Yurio’s past annoyance at having been beaten by a meagre two points at the European Championships had come back, Mila had been on a winning streak for several months, so she was almost unusually talkative and cheery now, Georgi, apart from being in the slow but comfortingly steady process of getting a new girlfriend, was also very determined to beat his personal records, which made him as talkative as Mila, and Victor was, well, Victor was held awake by smouldering excitement and resolve.

Yuuri was the only one who kept quiet (and, unlike Yurio, without looking upset), but that was mostly because he had spent most of yesterday weaving himself a delicate blanket of calmness, and now was carefully keeping it over himself. Victor had helped him a bit with trimming the edges into neat lines, but for now he knew that Yuuri was best left to his own devices.

Since they weren't going far, the flight had been pretty short, compared to others, but they all preferred to check in immediately and take a short nap before squeezing some more practice the evening before the competition. Taking into consideration the hectic atmosphere they found waiting for them the next morning, it had been the best possible decision.

 

Most of them were in the same group, which was unfortunate, because they were bound to miss someone's routine, but also a good thing, since it showed how close their rankings were. The morning of the first day, Yuuri was running in place with an otherwise blank expression on his face.

“Nervous?” Victor asked this time, carefully, because sometimes saying it out loud helped too.

Yuuri glanced at him, his face getting the slightest hint of emotion. “When am I not?”

Victor’s shoulder rose, and then fell with a slow movement. “Good nervous?”

Yuuri bounced in place for a few more moments, and then replied. “Yes,” he said, looking at the practice rink in front of them. “Yes, I think so.”

That was ideal. After competing separately the months before – Victor at the Europeans and Yuuri at Four Continents – this was going to be the first shared competition for them (at least, during this season). Victor had been mostly working on keeping himself balanced, not to become too hectic or too brooding, and the decade he’d had to get used to going around with flippant butterflies buzzing around various parts of his body and nervous system was more than useful.

Right now, he decided not to ask anything more, since Yuuri wasn’t the type to like being coddled or extensively fussed over before competing. Victor liked to think that he was getting better at the coach thing, after all the feedback he’d got from quite a number of people lately (Yuuri, giving him vague nudges into the right direction when he strayed, Yurio, with less vague arguments, Yakov, with a severity that made him sound as if he was really involved in Victor’s post-skating career, to Victor’s only temporary surprise). Still, past experiences should have taught him to expect to be surprised, when it came to Yuuri.

Accordingly, “I’m kind of – excited,” Yuuri said, and Victor, mid-stretching, blinked at him. Yuuri busied himself with his gloves. “We didn’t get to compete together ever since you came back, and that’s always been…you know,” he shrugged, not looking at Victor, and thus not getting to see the undoubtedly huge grin he sported.

“I was thinking the same thing,” Victor said, because it was true and because one part of him had more or less subconsciously been longing for this all throughout last year.

“Yeah, but also because…,” Yuuri started, stretched a bit, and let his gaze wonder over the high ceiling of the arena. “People have kept saying how we might be dragging each other down, with this whole – _arrangement_ ,” and here, most wonderfully for Victor’s heart, he rolled his eyes. “And that we won’t be as good now as we were when competing separately,” he continued, with a wry smile, and Victor had to smile at that too.

These people obviously were as oblivious to how much Victor’s mental state had plummeted at some point during the year before he’d met Yuuri as Victor himself had been. Given that, he maybe oughtn’t completely blame them, but still, he’d been the one who’d had to watch Yuuri forcefully keep himself together as he read these articles, and teeth-clenchingly ignore the more aggressive questions the journalists threw at him after _Four Continents_ , so Victor felt entitled to some personal spite.

On his part, however, Victor couldn’t say he had cared all that much about the press, but he recognised that that was mostly due to his longer history of being in the spotlight and, equally so, to his personality in general. It was quite exciting to find himself sharing Yuuri’s resolve in proving them wrong.

“Let’s show them, then,” Victor said, rising up, and then swiftly went to put on his skates and get on the ice, since he'd just seen Yakov come in with Yurio. His own pep talk could wait until after he’d warmed up.

 

“I’ll try to be here in time to see all of you too,” Mila was talking to all of them who were listening, but mostly to Yuuri. “But we should all come together tonight and get dinner somewhere, don't you think?”

“I heard Emil say that he knew some places around,” Yuuri said, rolling the sleeves of his costume in preparation for dealing with his hair.

“That's great, Sara must know something about it then. It would be good not to be the only one in charge of gathering everyone together,” Mila nodded, searching the pockets of her competition jacket for her phone.

She must not have been aware of it, but her last sentence had already brought a half-guilty grimace to Yuuri’s face.

“I could tal—” he started, painfully reluctant, but he was quickly interrupted by Yurio.

“Yes, but not—” he also began to say before being interrupted by Mila.

“Of course, I only meant people we get along with,” she explained, and Yurio visibly sagged with relief and went back to trying to tie his hair.

“Seems reasonable,” Victor said, to partake in the conversation, and angled his head to start applying eyeliner to his other eye. It was a pretty steady process by now, since he'd never trusted anyone else with it.

“I guess, I can't really think about anything that happens after this, now,” Yuuri said, and his voice was kind of steady too, proof of him still holding on tight to his blanket on mental calmness. He raked his hands several times through his hair, wetting and turning it this way and that.

Mila hummed in sympathetic agreement. “Where's Georgi?”

“Getting some water and presumably a last-minute pep talk from Yakov,” Victor said, capping his eyeliner.

At this, Mila smirked. “When did you get yours?”

“Ten minutes before him,” Victor answered truthfully, batted Yuuri’s hands away, and started arranging his hair himself.

Not that there was much to do to it, given the slightly awkward length it had reached lately. It was visibly longer than in December, but still too short to braid or tie up. Victor merely ruffled it into a state of intriguing wildness, then grabbed one of Yurio’s yet unused silver pins and pinned Yuuri’s fringe to the side with it.

“Keep it like that until it's your turn, so it doesn't bother you,” he said, and turned to look away. “Yurio, do you need any help?”

Yurio, who had refused Lilia’s and – even louder – Mila’s offer to arrange his hair, had been relatively struggling with it for the past fifteen minutes. At hearing Victor, he glared profusely in the mirror, but eventually dropped his hands.

“Yes,” he grumbled, so Victor went right to him.

 

During most of last year, Victor had pondered over a mental dilemma: whether it would be more enjoyable to watch Yuuri gently wipe the floor with all the contestants or to do it himself. On this day, he found out that the former was just the _slightest_ bit more entertaining, if only due to its novelty.

Besides, Yuuri had a mesmerising personality, when it came to this. Simultaneously, he managed to look both embarrassed to be reminded of his victories, and completely unapologetic about them. Victor was, as several international televisions had already seen in November, just the slightest bit in love with the way pride looked on his face.

It made the gnawing feeling in his stomach when he analysed his own programme subside an unexpected, but very welcome amount.

The rest of that gnawing feeling was Yakov’s concern, who proceeded to completely beat it down to a pulp like he was going to serve it as otbivnaya for dinner.

“I don’t want to see you making that face,” Yakov had told him several times during the past few months, whenever Victor stepped off the ice with a closed-off demeanour. “You know how taxing this is for you. If you’d just align your worldview with the present for once, maybe you’d finally stop looking for progress and focus on consistency.” Victor agreed, mostly. “Vitya, you’re one of the best skaters I’ve ever had, so you must know this. It’s _this_ easy to plummet when you’re at the very top. Being consistent is no shame, it’s something that takes a whole career of skill.” He took another look at Victor’s face and sighed. “Look at it logically. Something had to give.”

Victor knew that, but that was no excuse. There was Yurio, of course, and there was Yuuri, and there were several young, rising athletes, but, still looking at it logically, Victor knew – most of the world was still a world away from him. They’d have to climb as much as he’d done before getting to surpass him.

 

He did know, and he’d gone through several of Yuuri’s breathing exercises before the Free Programme, and gave as much of himself as he could endure to the world, and afterwards he’d engulfed Yakov in a bone-crushing hug and he’d smacked a kiss to Yuuri’s cold cheek, and did none of these to Yurio, who had managed to bypass both by simply running out of range.

Victor had known that this life would be a rollercoaster since he’d first set foot on the ice at a national competition. He’d climbed as high and as fast as he could, never knowing when he’d reach the top, refusing to believe it when people said he had, and climbing even higher, until there they were, his two world records, now both rewritten. It had all been just a matter of time, but it had still hurt when he’d realised he could climb no higher, that he had got, in all honesty, as far as his body could have taken him.

He could’ve either stepped back while still at the top, or let himself glide in a graceful decline. In the end, he’d missed this too much to do the former. So, now, if he was being understanding and reasonable about the current state of things, all things considered, Victor could be quite proud of himself. He was high, very high, but he was also waiting.

 

Then, there was also that other thing:

“You were brilliant,” Yuuri told him, right after the kiss and cry, with his cheeks and the tip of his nose still red from his own programme.

Victor could easily name two inexcusable over-rotations from the top of his head. Being both a competitor and a coach, with four new choreographies to arrange, was bound to take its toll, after all, however much he’d tried to ignore it. Yet, right then, in that moment, he’d had to take a shaky breath and let a happy grin split his face. When they hugged, Victor felt only relief; to be back, to be okay, and not to be alone.

At the very end of it, through some very powerful collective effort, they had even succeeded in making Yuuri be the one to take the group picture and post it on his freshly inaugurated official Instagram account (made right in between the breaks between skating groups, on the last day).

 

“It’s nice to have you back,” Christophe told him now, when they were all crowded in a rustic-looking restaurant close to their hotel. “It’s been so mournfully lonely.”

Victor smiled. “So you’ve said. Are you sure you’re not just feeling old? Having trouble connecting with the upcoming young prodigies?”

Chris elbowed him, but very gently. “Like you’re one to talk.”

Victor wasn’t. Yuuri had laughed at him for an entire morning when he’d first caught him looking for grey hairs on his head. “Touché.”

It was quite late, by their standards, but it was a special occasion and nobody had seemed in a hurry to get back to their hotel rooms, so here they were. After becoming intimately acquainted with jet lag last year, Victor was just glad for the reasonable time zone. Helsinki was close enough that they could have just as well driven there. It was strange to think that the sea he’d seen on their short trip through the city was the same as the one he’d been looking at since times immemorial in Saint Petersburg.

As a joke, he’d asked Yuuri whether he wanted to invite everyone over for a prolonged post-competition sleepover. Yuuri had simply pointed out that Victor’s apartment was a rough 40 m2, _if_ they counted the closet too.

“There were some promising new faces,” Victor mused, relatively still to Chris, as he analysed the decorous assortment of antlers and hunting gear on the walls.

Chris made an assenting sound, but immediately afterwards a sly grin appeared on his face. Victor could see it, even without turning his head towards him. “What’s that? You’re thinking of taking on more pupils in the near future?”

Victor snorted, the most adequate answer to a question like that. “Not anytime soon.” It was good that Yurio was out of earshot, for once too busy catching up in real time with Otabek to pay any attention to him, or he would surely have taken his tone as a challenge.

“Sure, sure,” Chris said, pouring them a drink of whatever had been brought to their table. “Come, even _I_ have a couple young people queuing up, in case it ever strikes my fancy.”

Victor blinked and turned to him at that. “Does it? Strike your fancy?”

Chris offered an articulate shrug to rival Yuuri’s. He offered him a glass of whatever. “Who knows? We’ll see how I fare in autumn.”

Victor accepted the glass, all the while thinking: Chris was trying to see if there was any more to climb too. Victor hoped there was, just a little bit more; Chris had always been resilient. Yet, it only seemed like yesterday that they’d finally stepped into the same competition together.

“Look at them, they’re having old men conversations,” Phichit said, head resting on a fist and grinning at them from across the table.

Chris laughed, but Victor simply narrowed his eyes reproachfully at him, which only made Phichit’s grin widen. This was a rather new addition to his social life, actually, even if he’d shared a couple competitions with Phichit before. Since Yuuri had promised to try and not drop off the face of the Earth again anytime soon, the occasional video call with Phichit was something that had inserted itself rather neatly in their evening routines – and so, Victor had found himself intermittently joining in on the conversation.

For how put together and eccentric his apartment seemed at first, Yuuri had been right – it _was_ rather small, when shared by two people and a dog. That Victor had found himself developing a probing, and very amused friendship with Phichit was just the natural course of things, in these circumstances.

So, yes, Phichit could get away with calling him an old man, on occasion.

“How’s your back? Your knees, other articulations?” Phichit asked, picking up one of the rather large menus that had just been brought to the table.

Victor smiled pleasantly. “Almost as good as yours, I assume.” Which was to say – still going, with enough salves and bandages. Pulling through.

“I’m flattered,” Phichit said, and analysed the menu for a couple moments. “Who’s trying the strange venison with me?”

“I will,” Victor said without much hesitation, not as much out of magnanimity as because he was genuinely curious. It was always good to share that curiosity with someone.

From beside him, Yuuri leant into his shoulder and pointed at a particular title on the menu. He followed the direction and tried the word in his mouth a couple of times.

“Vispipuuro?”

Yuuri grinned, as if he’d only wanted to hear him say it out loud. “Maybe it will remind you of your youth,” he said, and, after a moment, Victor gasped.

“ _Yuuri_!” Which couldn’t have been more emphatic if it had been spoken by Caesar _after_ he’d been stabbed the first time. Yuuri, however, just laughed, accompanied by proud praises and more laughter from Phichit.

 

“So, are you going home now that this is over?” Victor heard Phichit ask well after their dinner was over, and saw him twirl around an interesting-looking glass of some other Finnish drink.

“I guess so?” Yuuri said, sounding confused. “There's not really much we’ve planned to do here after the competition, after all…” he continued, turning to glance a bit at Victor, who silently raised his eyebrows in expectation and question. “Ah.”

“What?” Phichit asked.

Yuuri looked down, and rubbed at his own cheek with an expression of mild embarrassment. “No, I’m not going back to Japan just yet. I thought, maybe in summer,” he almost whispered.

Phichit must have picked up on it too, since his next line sounded amused, but Victor was too busy feeling fluttery and light inside to register what he actually said. _Home_. He knocked his knee into Yuuri’s, in the closest approximation of his feelings.

Yuuri reciprocated, at first, but when Victor softly kicked him one last time, just as he was about to join Mila, Sara, and (strangely) Georgi in their very active conversation about alpine skiing, Yuuri simply answered him by laying his hand on his thigh. Victor did nothing like stutter his current sentence to a stop; in fact not even his smile faltered, but that didn’t mean he didn’t feel it. In a quite sappy and mystifying way, the casualness of that gesture, small as it was, made him feel safe, where he’d only been moderately content before. It was the same kind of reassurance as hearing the word _home_ leave Yuuri’s mouth, and learning he’d meant Saint Petersburg.

 

The first thing Victor did, when they got back from _Worlds_ , was make good on an old promise to himself. So, coat barely shed and their luggage still in the middle of the living room, he went to grab Yuuri’s sleeve, just as he was finally getting a much longed-for glass of water. Some flights, no matter how short, were really the worst, especially when they were still tired after too few hours of sleep.

He waited for Yuuri to finish downing the glass before finally saying something, his fingers sliding from his sleeve to his palm under Yuuri’s own guidance. “Let's take a bath.”

Even in Victor’s opinion, they both had earned it.

Yuuri’s face did that thing it did when his worldview readjusted from generic to actual reality. It happened, sometimes, when he was tired or preoccupied, and Victor would either catch him gazing out the window with speechless wonder at what lay beyond, or look up from a desolate bowl of cereals to look at Victor, a flux of confusion, awe, recognition, and affection passing over his face in the span of two seconds, as he remembered the state their life was in, now.

It happened to Victor too, sometimes, in moments when he would be so engulfed in his mental logistics that, for a while, he'd forget he was no longer living alone, and then Yuuri would come to check on him, and the sheer amount of relief Victor felt in those moments was one of the strongest things he'd ever felt.

“You want to take a bath?” Yuuri asked now, just to be sure, and Victor took his other hand in his too, with a silent nod.

He pulled him slightly closer, watching Yuuri’s gaze drift to their hands as his face got softer in that way it only did when Victor chose the perfect moments to be affectionate. It made Victor’s heart beat louder, and he pressed their foreheads together, closing his eyes and focusing only on Yuuri’s fingers tracing the lines of his palms.

“Okay,” Yuuri said, quietly, and Victor pressed a kiss to his temple before pulling back to go prepare said bath.

 

Victor couldn't believe they hadn't taken a single bath together in all the two months since Yuuri had moved in. Hasetsu had seriously spoiled him in that department.

“This has bergamot in it,” Yuuri said, analysing a small bottle of bath foam as he sat on the edge of the tub.

Victor kept testing the slowly rising water every other moment. “Oh, leave it for some other time, then. It would be too strong.”

“Okay,” Yuuri said, setting it aside and looking over the next one.

This was either a hit or a miss, since Victor was only in possession of three of them, gathered back in the day when he went on impulsive and rather expensive shopping trips in the most central shops.

“Jasmine?” Yuuri offered.

Victor beamed. “Yes, that's great! Let's use that one.”

If a bit uncertain, Yuuri succumbed the bottle to his eager hands. “Do we really need it? Not that I’m complaining or anything…”

“Of course we do. That's the only thing I thought was missing last year. I thought, _ah, Vitya, see, if only this onsen had special bubble baths, this would be better than Heaven_.”

“Please don't ever tell my dad that, he dreads cleaning the place,” Yuuri said, one hand raised to his mouth as if to hide both his shock and his grin.

“You'll all realise it's a genius idea in the end,” Victor sighed, turning off the tap.

Delightful wisps of steam were rising above the bathtub, a wonderful promise for their aching and sore bodies. Solemnly, Victor poured a full half of the bath foam in.

“Shall we set an alarm clock? In case we fall asleep,” Yuuri asked, watching as Victor stirred the water with equally solemn strokes.

He had to grin at that, however. “You really think we will? Am I not entertaining enough?”

Most painfully, Yuuri didn't even pretend to think long about it. “I think _I_ might, at least. I haven't slept well in three days.”

Victor threw some foam at him. Most of it landed on his hair, but there was a smaller patch which was sliding down his glasses, and Yuuri only gaped at him for a moment before laughing and retaliating.

 

Of course, now they were not _technically_ on holiday. For one, there were still a few ice shows left, but those weren’t too stressful even for Yuuri. Practice happened daily, as usual, and nobody was actually slacking off, but there was something more relaxed about it. You no longer got reproachful eyes if you arrived an hour or two late, or left sooner, or took the occasional day off. Well, actually, maybe you did, since Yakov, while not unreasonable, still wanted discipline even in their free time. Still, they were there, most days, counting the days until the weather finally took a turn for the better and the sunny streets and parks outside became more tempting than their chilly palace.

Victor had skimmed some websites, during one of their breaks, and he'd once again found something which sounded just the right amount of peculiar. He kind of wanted to make lunch, one of these days. Soon.

“I give up, I’m booking a flight to Malta,” Mila went as far as declaring one day, barely a week after _Worlds_.

Victor was only within earshot because they were waiting for the others to finish changing out of skating gear before they went to a nearby pub. Even so, he raised an intrigued eyebrow when he saw, on her phone screen, that she was actually scrolling through plane ticket deals.

“What are you going to do there by yourself, with your nonexistent sense of direction?” asked Yurio, retying his laces on a nearby bench.

In retaliation, Mila ruffled his hair right out of his ponytail. “Psh, I’ll bring someone along.”

Yurio was still expressing his opinion about her in general.

“Language, Yura,” Victor said, mildly, scrolling through his own phone.

Mainly, he wanted to see if their paths were going to cross with others’ in the near future. It seemed that Chris was going to be at the same ice show as them the following week; they would have met even more often, but Yurio had strictly refused to set foot in Canada outside of the season, so the rest of them had sort of gone along with it, although they didn’t necessarily need to.

“I can’t believe there’s no direct flight, it’s not like we live in the middle of nowhere,” Mila complained, scrolling more assiduously.

Victor looked over her shoulder. “At least it’s only 6 hours.”

“Yes, at best,” she sighed, leaning back against the wall just as Yuuri and Georgi came out of the locker room, discussing something with more gusto than Victor had seen them use with each other before.

When they approached, and their gazes met, Victor subtly raised his eyebrows. “Dance classes,” Yuuri clarified.

Mila, meanwhile, had got up and shoved her phone at Georgi. “Gosha, you’ve travelled by plane more than me, which do you suggest?”

At which Georgi silently pointed to something on her screen. “You’re going somewhere?” he asked, afterwards.

“Yep, Malta, do you want to come?” she answered casually, focused on her transactions. “Yura, you’re invited too. Both of you.”

“No, thanks,” Yurio grumbled, more out of habit than actual irritation.

Yuuri, meanwhile, only looked a bit confused at his own newly assigned nickname. Then, as an afterthought, he looked at Victor. “I found the key to the mailbox.”

“Really?” They had spent several hours looking for it last weekend. “Where?” Victor asked, watching as Yuuri took the small and treacherous thing out of his pocket.

“The bottom of my gym bag. I’m sorry, I don’t know how it got there,” he said, handing it to Victor.

“Well, no matter,” Victor said, pulling out his apartment keys and attaching the new acquisition to them, for safer keeping.

“Why are we still sitting here?” Yurio asked at that point, most opportunely.

“Because I can’t remember my card number,” Mila groaned over her phone, then suddenly shoved it in her jacket pocket. “Nevermind, let’s go eat something, I’ll finish it there.”

 

Of course, the pub they actually got to was the one close enough to the rink to have been examined and approved by all the medical personnel, which made it a whole lot less fun, but at least it seemed less impersonal than the dining hall at the rink. All the same, as he nursed his strictly natural drink, Victor couldn’t help but miss the small family businesses of Hasetsu, with their few chairs and even fewer tables, and their rooms always smelling of twenty different dishes, seemingly at once completely foreign to Victor and startlingly eager to pull him in their midst too.

He missed the drinks Yuuri’s dad occasionally brought him, which were always as welcome as they were new, as if he’d somehow taken a look at Victor and divined exactly what kinds he’d like. He missed the way Hiroko would always ask him to the kitchen whenever she made something he hadn’t had before, having also seen how eager he’d been to try everything.

To somehow soothe all this, he pressed his thigh to Yuuri’s, and felt one of the weights on his chest become lighter when Yuuri returned the gesture, even as he was profusely questioned by Georgi (and, begrudgingly, Yurio) about his dancing experiences.

“ _Vityusha_ ,” Mila said, a bit louder than her background voice, which meant Victor hadn’t heard her the first time. He raised his head, expectant. “Do you two have any travelling plans?”

“Ah,” Victor said, then looked to Yuuri, also brought to attention now, who offered him an undecided shrug. “Nothing definite, yet. Japan, definitely, but maybe some other places too.”

At the second part of that sentence, he registered Yuuri’s surprise out of the corner of his eye. Understandably, since he just remembered that, for all his sprinkled ideas, he might have forgotten to actually mention any of them to him. However, when he chanced an apologetic glance towards Yuuri, he didn’t seem particularly upset, luckily enough.

“Depends on how much time we can actually take off,” Yuuri said, gracefully drifting from one conversation to the other.

Had he been more aware of himself, it would have sounded more stilted, but practice was over for the day and the atmosphere was lazy and calm as they waited for their food, and Victor had long since learnt that this easy grace was more often than not a subconscious, but deeply rooted thing for him.

“Oh, well, yes, I suppose that matters too,” said Victor, not even bothering to hide the fact that he was the type to take almost a whole season off compulsively. The looks the others gave him showed that they, too, thought the same thing.

After a while, Mila rested her cheek in one hand and let out a soft sigh. “I wanna see this decadent place of relaxation too. Yura, do you think we could come for a visit after the next Grand Prix Final? It’s in Nagoya, after all. Is that very far from your place?”

For a moment, Yuuri just blinked at her, and Victor wondered whether anybody had used the word _decadent_ to describe his family’s inn before. “Um, more or less. Around 6 hours,” he eventually managed.

“That would be ideal,” Mila went on, dreamily, with another sigh. “Like an early winter holiday.”

“Since when do we get holidays in winter, of all times?” Yurio leant over the table to scowl at her, but he was completely ignored.

Victor, however, remembered something, which was such a strange occurrence that he even snapped his fingers at it. “That’s right! Yurio, the Europeans are in Moscow next year, aren’t you excited?”

Since he was leaning over it anyway, Yurio chose to just slide down to the table and hide his mouth in his crossed arms. “I guess,” he allowed.

“Here’s the food!” Mila announced, snapping out of her dreamy state.

“Do you think bringing home a couple more professional skaters will be as good for business as it was last year?” Victor asked Yuuri, while they were presented with a quite generous number of dishes. Letting Mila and Georgi order had been a good idea.

Beside him,  and staring at a lush salad that seemed to have at least three meals combined in one, Yuuri shrugged. “They’ve been doing alright, ever since you took us by storm.”

Victor, a performer by nature and profession, thoroughly enjoyed that mental image. Yet, he also thought, “I hope we’ll have part of some quiet moments too, when we go back, though.”

“We’ll find a way,” Yuuri said, fiddling with his glass to pass the time until he made up his mind on what to start with.

 Victor grinned. “Where there’s a will, there’s a way?”

Yuuri took a quiet sip, and then replied without looking at him. “Something like that.”

Victor thought both of them were good enough examples of how true that saying was.

 

Victor had gathered many (more lately, but several from previous years too) interesting recipes, kept either in bookmarks on his phone, on his laptop, or in magazine clippings in one of his cupboards. However, when inspiration hit him one evening, he didn’t go to any of these. Instead, he went to his more cluttered bookshelves (full with books and magazines and albums and various trinkets, either his or Yuuri’s) and retrieved the carefully xeroxed and bound version of Yuuri’s mom’s cookbook. She’d been extremely lovely in sending it to them so diligently when they’d asked for it, and the excitement in her voice upon hearing Victor’s intention to use it at some point had been truly touching.

So, Yuuri’s mother was a lovely, lovely lady. Before he’d got to Hasetsu, Victor hadn’t really had the pleasure of talking extensively with ladies quite as sweet and warmly friendly as her. Then again, Victor hadn’t been the sort of person to have the time for prolonged interactions before then either. His mother had been lovely and friendly, while they lived together, but she had not been warm. His grandmother had been warm like a kitchen stove when one came in from -40 degree weather, but her love had been the kind that could crush rocks with bare hands if you were hurt or walk out in a snowstorm in search of medicine, not the soft and soothing one that made you hot tea and caressed your cheek when you were ill. Victor loved and needed both of these kinds of love, and he was really, truly, a very lucky person to have felt them.

Yuuri’s mom had a disguised fairytale feeling about her; she reminded him of that feeling every fairytale carried with it, although it rarely ever appeared on page – the feeling one ought to have when their parent tucked them in for the night, laying a warm blanket over them just as the story reached its end. It was so cozy that one night Victor caught himself wondering how Yuuri had been able to stay away from home for this long.

Also, Victor distinctly remembered being served breakfast right on time every morning when he’d stayed in Hasetsu. Nobody would have ever asked him to lift a finger for it if he hadn’t offered, this he also knew. He’d said himself that he was hopeless, but it had still felt nice, to help Yuuri’s mom with the little she trusted him with – even though she’d probably trusted him more than Yuuri, at the time – while she did the brunt of the work. He supposed he ought to return the favour, at some point, as well as he could.

 _Maybe in summer_ , he thought. That left him with at least four months to get _very_ good at making at least one dish of formidable food. For now, though, he still needed help.

Although his more complicated meal ideas were still dutifully drafted and bookmarked on various of his devices, on this day Victor had come home with only sushi on his mind.

This time, at least, he had all the ingredients he needed at home, since only last week he’d begged Yuuri to make one of his mom’s less comprehensible dishes. This didn't mean that Victor knew what to do now, as he’d always considered the sushi-making process to be a deceptively easy one.

He’d consulted several websites to share notes on how to best cook the rice, and then to get a definite idea of what fillings to choose and how to mix them, but he still wasn't fully confident he'd get the desired final product. At least, not enough to get Yuuri’s full approval, because otherwise what was the point.

So, after he left the rice to steam, he fell on a sprawl on the couch, revelling in the voluminous pillows that had gathered there during the past couple of months. They were, as was said, comfortable creatures, and they'd both indulged themselves in this aspect from time to time. Still, this left Victor with the complicated mission of finding his phone in their midst without getting up at all. The occasion of having the couch all to himself, with Makkachin soundly sleeping in their unmade bed, was truly a momentous one, and Victor was not going to part from it easily.

After he _did_ find it, in a feat of human effort, he checked some of the suspiciously succinct instructions once again, and let out a dissatisfied sigh. He analysed his light fixtures for a while. Then, a lightbulb came to life inside his own head, and he beamed with it.

He was up from the couch and doing some excited steps around his living room in just a few moments. A few rings started going through, and he glanced at a similarly newly acquired wall clock. It ought to still be morning over there, so he probably wasn't imposing much.

“Hello?”

Just hearing that voice and Victor felt thrown back into warm rooms smelling like simmering food and the wet wood from outside. He went through his greetings with more enthusiasm thanks to that.

“Oh, Vicchan! I saw the foreign number, but I thought it was some of our old guests.” A quick mental calculation told Victor that he, indeed, had usually just used Yuuri’s phone when talking to her. “How have you been? Are you all well?”

“Of course, we’re doing great. We’ve just been to an ice show last week, I’m not sure if you’ve seen that,” Victor started, a smile on his face, his free hand fixing up his flowing drapes.

“Not in high quality, sadly. But just the other day we’ve watched the Worlds Competition again, with some old family friends. Everybody was very impressed,” she said, solemnly, and Victor, standing right in the middle of his apartment, suddenly felt homesick.

“I’m so glad,” he said, nevertheless. “How is everyone?”

He heard Hiroko take a breath, as if preparing for a very accurate answer. “Oh, Minako was just here, on her way back from her morning walk, I expect. And we haven't seen Yuuko or Takeshi in quite a while, but you know how busy they are now, what with the triplets just about to start school again. They said they wanted to send you something along with our next package. Which, by the way, we should be sending your way pretty soon, our first batches of jam are almost all ready.”

The homesickness in Victor got just the slightest bit worse. “I can hardly wait, you're all so kind,” he said, and smiled to himself while she reassured him profusely that it was no trouble. “Did you get what we sent you last month?”

“Yes, of course! Those were such lovely souvenirs, they’re great additions to the dining room, we received several compliments.”

“That's good! We were very careful when we picked them,” Victor said, happily, and then turned around at the sound of his timer going off. Presumably, the rice had been steamed enough. “Oh, right. Are you very busy right now? I actually called for some advice.”

Hiroko’s curiosity was evident even before she spoke. “What kind of advice? He likes flowers, even if he’ll act like it's a bother if you get him any.”

“No, I was actually – Really?” Victor’s priorities won in the end.

“Yes. Especially lilac or, what was it called, asagao, but it’s not really their season and you can’t put those in a bouquet anyway. But anything blue would do,” she assured him.

“Blue?” Victor asked, with a smile.

“Of course, ever since he was twelve” she said, sharing his knowing tone. “Now, what _did_ you want to ask me?”

“Right.” It was time for Victor to take a breath of his own. “I was on my way to make us some sushi, but the process has left me confounded.” After a short pause, he clarified. “Confused.”

“Ah, well, that happens to all of us.” Taking into consideration their respective experience with cooking alone, Victor very much doubted it. “Is Yuuri not with you?”

“No, he’s…” Victor thought how to best say it. “Helping some of the kids at our rink with their ballet lessons.”

He’d been very pointedly and intimidatingly volunteered for it by Lilia, which wouldn't have left any place for refusal even if Yuuri _hadn’t_ been willing. It was lucky that he had been. Meanwhile, Victor was prohibited from going anywhere near her young minds, due to his “easily distracted and chaotic nature”. He’d chosen to take it as a compliment.

“He should tell Minako, she would be so proud,” Hiroko said, utterly proud and pleased herself. “How far did you get with the sushi?”

Victor took the chance to peek into the pot. “Well, I’ve just washed, cooked, and steamed the rice,” he said, and she hummed in agreement.

Then, she guided him step by step as he finished preparing the rice, and then they had an intermission to pick and group the fillings, just for Victor to reach an utter impasse once he saw himself faced with an empty sushi mat and a thin sheet of dried seaweed.

Hiroko was doing her best to tell him how to place, fill, and roll the rice correctly, but it was hard, what with them being only over the phone and with the language barrier. It was easier to slip when talking about things one was familiar with, as Victor well knew.

“Okay, wait, can I just…” he looked around for his laptop, found it under a blanket, also on the couch, and carried it one-handed to the kitchen counter. “Can we switch to a computer?”

“Oh, yes,” she said, breathy with relief. “That would be so much easier. Just let me find Mari’s and we can continue.”

That was a much better course of action, so once they both hung up, Victor swiftly made himself presentable (mostly by taking the pins he’d borrowed from Yurio out of his hair), conscientiously rolled up his sleeves (because this had turned out to be an April as cold as last year's), and video called the Katsuki house.

“Okay, can you see me?” he said, after pushing the laptop just out of his range of (cooking) action.

He got an eager nod from Yuuri’s mom, who seemed to be, if Victor’s eyes told him right, in a strangely quiet version of their kitchen. Over in Japan, the sun was shining brightly through the leaves just outside the window. Victor glanced at his own windows, just to be sure, but there was no doubt about the fact that sunlight in Russia just didn't seem as warm as the one he was currently seeing on his screen.

“So, I have the rice right here, I added the vinegar too, and I placed seaweed on the mat,” he recounted, showing at the various bowls that had gathered on his kitchen counter, but Hiroko was quick to interrupt him.

“Slow down, slow down, let me look at you,” she said, clasping her hands together in apparent delight and beaming at him.

For a second, Victor only blinked, but he was a performer and he lived to please, so he soon turned to face the laptop. In a show of amused and patient indulgence, he put a hand on his hip and shifted his smile to match the sentiment.

“See? Thank you,” Hiroko grinned. Victor had seen that same grin reflected at him almost daily, on a different face. “It's so hard to make out your face on these competition videos, and if I do, you all just look so serious. I wanted to see how you were,” she explained. “You look very well.”

Victor _felt_ well, a positive feeling for once, and not a neutral one. It had been building up inside him for the better part of a year.

“Thank you, you look lovely too, as usual,” he said, and Hiroko did that half-embarrassed and half-pleased face that Yuuri had learnt to perfection too. “It seems pretty quiet, over there,” he remarked.

Hiroko looked around her, that smile still lingering on her face. “Yes, it is. There aren't too many guests at this time of year, when we don't have international celebrities around,” she said, with a grin that Victor mirrored. “It will get louder in summer, but for now it's only the usuals, and,” she leant in, conspiratorially, “today is my day off.”

“Really? How lucky of me.”

“Really! So let's see what you have.”

In a slow, and quite creative way, she demonstrated to Victor, using a rolling pin, how to best fix the seaweed over the rice & co. It took a few tries, but eventually he got it right, and proceeded to the next.

“I was quite nervous about this, I hope it tastes right,” he eventually admitted, because it was easier to do so when his hands were speckled with rice and, thanks to the lack of hairpins, his fringe was constantly getting in his eyes. Well, not that it didn't usually do that, but he'd got used to the change.

“Don't worry, I’m sure it tastes alright. You'll form your hand at it in no time,” she said. She'd moved now to what had been one of Victor’s favourite couches, after seeing that he was finally managing without her constant demonstrations.

“That's what I’m hoping for,” he said, examining his second roll. It looked just a bit larger than the norm.

He wondered what his grandparents might say if he turned up on their doorstep with a box full of sushi during his next visit. Then he thought that they might appreciate the pasta more, and this brought him to relaying his past cooking adventures to Yuuri’s mom, thus _finally_ having someone look overtly proud of him for it.

“I’m so happy that you're trying new things. Yuuri always put on a forlorn face when I asked him to cook something, he really didn't like preparing food that was not approved by his nutritionist. Although, you know, I think that was because he liked ours better and he felt guilty about it,” she sighed.

Victor blinked, then thought about it. It was true that Yuuri had the tendency to look a bit conflicted when trying out richer foods, but Victor had never actually believed it was anything more than a passing thought. Heavens knew, Victor himself had had several diets prescribed to him across the years, and he’d stuck to them too, most of the time. He didn’t, at this moment, think either him or Yuuri were doing any lasting damage. Still, maybe it would be better to  ask, at some point.

“Well, I don’t think this will bother him too much,” Victor eventually said, analysing his innocent-looking sushi rolls.

“No, this should be okay,” Hiroko agreed. “Next time, though, you should let me teach you how to cook some authentic katsudon.”

Victor positively beamed, happier than Makkachin when it was time for a walk. “Absolutely! Maybe we can make some together when we’ll come over in summer.”

In a perfect mirror of Victor’s feelings, she clapped her hands together and grinned. “Of course! Oh, I can’t wait to have you both here again. You should let us know in advance when you’re coming so we can have everything ready, you’ve seen how it can get in summer.”

“Yes, I did,” Victor smiled, fond, missing and yearning for the year in which he felt like he’d grown to twice the person he’d been before. “We haven’t talked about it clearly yet, but we were thinking of coming over either in July or August. We’ll let you know.”

“Of course,” she smiled, and then just looked at him. “Thank you for the call.”

“My pleasure,” Victor said, and meant it too. “I’ll remind Yuuri to call more often.”

Hiroko let out an amused breath. “Oh, don’t worry about that, we know how he is. He’s always prone to forget one thing or other when he’s focusing on something else, but we know his heart is in the right place.”

Victor was just about to say something back when a telltale jingle of keys was heard, as if summoned. He looked over his shoulder, then back at his working table, with his – granted – finished rolls only halfway cut in eatable bits, and with some rice still sticking to his forearms and here and there on the counter.

“Just in time,” he nevertheless said to the camera.

As if on cue, Makkachin tumbled out of the bedroom too, getting to the door faster than Victor, which was a little bit embarrassing, given that Victor had only been four steps away from it this entire time.

“Oh, what’s the matter? Did you miss me?” Yuuri dropped to his knees as soon as the front door was closed, coddling Makkachin with the utmost care. Then, he looked over his shoulder at Victor too, with an easy smile. “Hi. The kids asked about you. They’ve all been very nice to me.”

 _Of course_ , Victor thought, fondly. As if they could have been anything else when Yuuri, a stranger, a top skater, and, even more importantly, unawarely charming at times, went there and – probably – took on the same tone Victor had witnessed him take with Yuuko’s kids, patient and encouraging, but also subliminally determined. Had Victor gone there, they would have mostly wasted their time gaping or asking unrelated questions or doing their own thing, trying to either impress or antagonise him. With Yuuri, at least when he got in his friendly serious mood, they must have had a harder time gathering their courage for anything like that.

“I’ll try to sneak in in the following weeks,” Victor said, then waited for Yuuri to glue himself off Makkachin and take off his shoes. “Come and see who’s here.”

Yuuri blinked in surprise, but he followed Victor the few steps to the kitchen, where Victor’s almost finished sushi was in full view on the counter. Luckily, thought, he only seemed to get one short glance at them before his eyes caught the laptop screen and his whole face opened up.

“Mom,” he said, incredulous, and they immediately fell into rapid and charmingly fluid Japanese.

Victor had been picking it up faster than he’d expected in the months he'd lived in Hasetsu, but he wasn't, at the moment, quite as proficient at it as Yuuri had got at Russian. Then again, Yuuri had started learning much sooner. Victor resisted the urge to bounce on his feet every time he remembered that.

However, he didn't find it hard to get the gist of their conversation (and the occasional detail too) now, since it was all one would have expected it to be. They both deflected worried questions about themselves with the practiced ease and fluidity of loving family members. Even Victor’s grandparents, stoic and witty as they were, were adept at it, whenever there was service enough for their calls to get through.

Since, however, Yuuri didn’t seem to have any intention of moving with the laptop to a more comfortable place than in the middle of their kitchen area, Victor decided, casually and inconspicuously, to go back to work. If Yuuri had any problem with Victor nudging him out of the way with his hip, he didn’t show it, but only shifted a bit to the side and continued his inquiries about the ones at home, and if his dad had had any luck with the brewery, and if Mari’s online courses were going well, and so on. Meanwhile, Victor finished cutting their (hopefully) dinner. He wondered whether Yuuri was actively disregarding it.

A question which was soon answered, as soon as Victor had poured some soy sauce in the smallest plate he owned.

“Yes, and Yura insisted that we get him the spiciest dish there was, so that’s what we did last weekend,” Yuuri recounted their adventures, even as he turned to inspect Victor’s handiwork. “Around three bottles of milk have been drunk that night.”

“Oh, that poor boy. But I remember Vicchan telling me that you’d been invited over for his birthday already,” his mother said, pensively. Then, she seemed to look after Victor, and switched back to English. “Wasn’t it Yurio who you said made you Solyanka?”

“That was last month,” Victor explained, keenly aware that Yuuri had finally decided to make a move, after staring at the food for what had seemed like centuries.

However: “Vitya can speak Japanese, mom,” he said, the traitor, just before raising one of the slightly bulky rolls to his mouth.

Victor loved him dearly, so the daggers he was currently looking at him must have been filled with some sort of emotion, by association. Hiroko was delighted, saying that she wasn’t sure how much he’d retained since he’d moved back to Russia, and Victor tried to both appreciate the sentiment and keep his sentences clearly within his vocabulary range as well as he could.

He _had_ been meaning to speak to her in Japanese, at some point, but not before he’d got to know it at an advanced level. She was, after all, somebody to impress. Besides, Yuuri, of all people, should have understood this, since this was the exact reason why he’d been so reluctant to speak in Russian with Victor, at first.

 _Ah_ …, Victor realised. He glanced at Yuuri, who was just finishing chewing, and who afterwards gave him a small, self-satisfied smile. _So that’s it. This is retaliation._

Nevertheless, they pulled through the last couple of minutes of conversation (before Yuuri’s dad started sending distress signals from a nearby room and Yuuri’s mom had to excuse herself) quite well, between Yuuri’s overly casual jabs and Victor’s necessary input whenever Yuuri chose a moment to pick up another roll. Still, by the time the call ended, Victor felt his jaw ache. It was strange how speaking new languages made you physically ache, as well as mentally. He’d almost forgotten.

“That was cruel,” Victor complained, while helping Yuuri transfer the plates to the dining table, so that they might at least sit down while eating. “How could you do that to me? We’re engaged to be _married_.”

“’It’s for your own good’,” Yuuri grinned at him as he took a seat.

Victor narrowed his eyes at him. That was what he’d said, but that had been _months_ before. “Cruel,” he repeated, and went to get him something to drink. He’d probably had to switch around three busses to get home from where the ballet practice was held, after all.

When Victor got back to him, with two glasses and one bottle of their heavily infused lemon waters, Yuuri was just trying to get back in his good books by taking yet another sushi roll. It reminded Victor that he was horrendously in love. It reminded him that he hadn’t yet heard any overt words of praise.

“Don’t they feed you over there?” he thus asked, pouring their drinks.

Yuuri hummed in a neutral manner, and chewed thoughtfully for a short while longer. “Some of the people there invited me to come with them to a place that was nearby,” he acknowledged, and then shrugged, looking a bit embarrassed. “But I wanted to come home and see what you’ve prepared.”

Victor bit his lip, almost unconsciously. “How did you know I was making something?”

“I don’t know,” Yuuri shrugged again, but this time actually smiled at him afterwards. “I just thought that you might.”

“Okay,” Victor said, pushing one glass towards him, and then leant forwards to press a kiss to his forehead. He only had to pull back a few inches to realise it wasn’t quite enough, given the situation, so the next thing he did was smack a wet kiss to Yuuri’s cheek. “Better,” he decreed, grinning, while Yuuri snickered against his shoulder.

 

“But were they _good_?” Victor asked that evening, while drying himself in the bathroom. Two doors and five big steps away, Yuuri had just been recounting the various ways in which he’d also been taught to make traditional food, when he was younger. Victor, of course, was asking about himself.

“Of course,” he heard Yuuri say, and grinned as he pulled on a T-shirt and pants, fresh out of the dryer. “I mean, they didn’t taste like mom’s, or like anyone else’s back at home,” Yuuri went on, his voice getting clearer as Victor stepped out of the bathroom and went from one doorway to the next, and into the bedroom. “But they were good. They had something very _you_ about them.”

Victor raised an eyebrow at him. Yuuri, still looking warm and comfortable from the shower he’d taken before Victor, hair ruffled and cheeks a bit flushed from the hot water, smiled at him.

“Must you always be so ambiguous,” Victor sighed dramatically, taking a seat on the edge of the bed, with Yuuri sitting cross-legged almost in the middle of it.

“I used to be worse,” he said, his smile turning from pleasant to private.

Victor, as mentioned, loved him dearly. There was only so much he could not do. For example, in that moment he couldn’t not raise his hand to Yuuri’s cheek and guide him to lean in, pressing their lips together so that Victor could tell for sure just how warm he actually was. He couldn’t not let his hands wander into Yuuri’s hair as he kissed him more determinedly, and he most certainly couldn’t not let himself pull and be pulled closer, until their movements got easier.

“You should’ve seen some of us today,” Yuuri said, after a while, idly running his thumb over Victor’s cheek. “We were so overwhelmed at first, we hardly even knew what to do, and that was after Ms Baranovskaya had given us several instructions in that cutting tone of hers.”

Lilia sometimes did that, picked a couple people with teaching potential from her various working environments, and tested them over a few ballet sessions. “I’m sure you did just fine,” Victor said, too content (and just a bit excited) to be of any real use. “She wouldn’t have let you take one more step in there if you had been doing anything horrendously wrong.” Which was true. Case in point: Victor.

“If you say so,” Yuuri said, seeming to lose interest in his own string of conversation too, while Victor traced lazy lines up and down his forearms. “Thanks for calling mom.”

Victor smiled, a little sadly. “No, believe it or not, it was me who needed her help. I was nearly losing myself in a mess of sticky rice and cucumber slices.”

“I saw,” Yuuri also smiled, hand cupping Victor’s cheek before kissing him once more.

It was all completely lovely, right down to the slightly numb sensation that had slid down to Victor’s fingertips, but he had to get one point across before anything else, so he pulled back, although barely. “You should call them more often.”

In acknowledgement, Yuuri let out a resigned sigh. “I know, I’m working on it.”

“At least keep them up to date enough so we’d still find a bed and a bath ready when we get there in summer,” Victor said, nuzzling Yuuri’s cheek.

A breath of laughter got out of Yuuri at that, but it wasn’t long-lived, since pretty soon Victor’s lips started to follow an erratic line along his jaw. That usually made Yuuri get more serious.

“Right,” Yuuri stubbornly decided to keep talking, nevertheless. “We need to talk about that too. Fix a date or an approximation of one and how we want to get there…”

Generally, Victor had been more than eager to finally start discussing holiday plans together. His headspace had gathered quite a number of interesting ideas and propositions about it. It was what Victor kept himself occupied with while stretching. Still, Yuuri was most uninspired in bringing it up now.

His hands felt wonderful on Victor’s back, though, going slowly over his shoulders and over the entire expanse of it and back again. Victor wanted to burrow into him and never get out again - or, at least, not until summer, when he might make an exception and get out to slip in the onsen for a few hours. “We’ll talk,” he muttered, as a compromise, into Yuuri’s T-shirt.

“Okay,” Yuuri said, but now in that quiet tone that usually made Victor both melt and wobble like an unsettled pudding, and his fingers caressed his back as they rose to thread through his hair.

The movement guided Victor to raise his eyes to him again. Even now, he felt giddy with happiness and relief, because, as much as he liked surprising and being surprised, Victor found nothing more comforting than seeing a familiar face in his most vulnerable moments.

Then Yuuri pressed his smile to Victor’s temple, and then from the corner of his eye, down his cheek, to the corner of his mouth, letting out a breathy laugh of his own in response to Victor’s when they just pressed their faces together. Victor hadn’t felt so profoundly safe, hadn’t been so _aware_ of it, in a very long time.

He kissed Yuuri’s shoulder and, in that moment, everything seemed just right, and Yuuri seemed to feel it too, as he nuzzled his hair and then his face, his breath warm on Victor’s already flushed cheeks, and Victor’s hand found his and he trailed his mouth over his jaw in as loving and reverent a manner as he possibly could, even though his body was an imperfect translator for the sheer amount of feeling he had inside him.

A couple of times in his life, so far, Victor had slightly felt like crying, when looking at him. It was what happened to him at the most wonderful twists in stories. It felt like his life had taken a wonderful turn of its own sometime last year, and he was still prone to occasional bursts of gratitude.

Yuuri was pushing a few wild strands of hair behind his ear, so Victor leant into the touch. It inched his face just right for Yuuri to lean in and kiss him, warmly, closely, intimately. Victor was just laying a hand on his waist, moments away from lying back and pulling Yuuri on top of him, when a few soft pads echoed on the floor, and suddenly Makkachin was up on the bed and taking his sleeping spot, just at their feet, with a soft thud.

Victor stopped, holding his weight, rather uncomfortably, on one arm. Yuuri stopped too, and looked over his shoulder, in pure surprise. On the turquoise sheets, Makkachin sighed with his eyes closed, waiting for sleep to come.

As he felt laughter start bubbling up in him, Victor’s hand slid from where it had rested partly on Yuuri’s T-shirt and partly on warm skin, where it had ridden up, and he brought it to his own face. A few moments later, Yuuri followed him by laughing and leaning into him so that his forehead rested on Victor’s shoulder.

“Okay, okay, I understand,” Victor said, pressing his cheek momentarily to Yuuri’s hair, before pushing himself, first into a more comfortable position, and then up on his feet. “Come, Makka, I know you’re sleepy,” he said, petting his fluffy head a couple of times. Makkachin sighed once more, which almost broke Victor’s heart, but not quite.

He swallowed back his incipient heartache and nudged Makkachin until he raised his head, sleepily. Yuuri was looking at them in fond amusement, though, and Victor still felt just a bit overexcited at nothing in particular, as if he’d had too much sugar, or maybe too many cups of Yakov’s too strong tea.

“Come, I’m very, very, _very_ sorry. Come,” Victor guided his hopefully very, very patient puppy off the bed, and then to the bedroom door, all the way cooing excuses. Once Makkachin was outside, and giving off hurt vibes, Victor crouched in the doorframe. “I’m so sorry, but you’ll see, the couch is comfy too, you know, and it's not that cold out anymore.”

Makkachin bore stoically through his last pats, though, and padded away towards the couch as soon as they were over. Victor smiled ruefully at the sight, but closed the door nevertheless. Afterwards, he turned and leant against it as if he'd just defeated a dragon, and looked towards Yuuri.

Yuuri who, while still sitting on the bed, was now gazing at him with something that was equal parts surprise and hidden pleasure. It made Victor smile at him too. What had he expected?

“That was mean,” Yuuri said, as Victor slowly treaded his steps back.

“With lots of treats, we might be forgiven,” Victor said, seating himself beside him again. “It's only for special occasions.”

“Is it?” Yuuri asked, looking at him. His eyes were bright.

With the excuse of wanting to see them better, Victor started pulling off his glasses. “Why not?” he also asked, grinning, when they were halfway down his nose.

After all, it wasn't like they'd done this before.

Which was, maybe, so to say, for lack of trying, as Victor swiftly thought once he’d actually managed to lie back on the pillows and dragged Yuuri after him, with no other preamble than a shared breath of laughter, followed by some more, once they were down. With one hand at the back of his neck and one softly pressing on his lower back, Victor slowly pulled him closer, revelling in the way Yuuri’s smile felt on his skin, his laugh in his mouth, his breath in his hair. It had been years since Victor had last felt someone’s weight on top of him, and he hadn’t even realised that he’d missed it. But, as Yuuri let their chests press together in such a relaxed manner, his forearms lying on each side of Victor’s head, fingers lazily playing with his hair, Victor felt the smallest weight lift off his chest.

And it was so nice to have Yuuri so close, to run his hands up and down his back so easily, to curl his fingers just a bit over the hem of his shirt, feeling the warm skin underneath. It was lovely that Yuuri seemed to enjoy this too just as much, his movements slow but steady as he let his mouth drift to Victor’s cheeks, to his jaw, the place behind his ear, open-mouthed kisses and quiet breaths which made Victor slide his fingers more determinedly under his shirt.

He had a question just on the tip of his tongue when Yuuri decided to speak first.

“I still feel a bit bad,” he confessed, making Victor gather back most of his focus, his hands stilling on his back.

“About what?” he asked.

As best as he could in his position, Yuuri shrugged. “Leaving Makkachin outside.”

There might have been place for a small joke, but Victor was staring too much to be able to think of anything of the sort. Victor loved him so much. He told him. In English, in French, in Russian, in Japanese, just so he could be sure that the message got across.

Yuuri almost laughed, but then smiled instead. “I love you too,” he said, but Victor was no longer able to tell what language he had spoken. It didn’t matter, really; all that mattered was that, when Victor closed his eyes, it only took a moment for Yuuri’s lips to touch his.

“We’ll buy many, many, _many_ treats,” he said after a while, circling his arms around Yuuri’s back and holding on tight. The sound Yuuri made as he buried his head in the crook of his neck was so utterly content that Victor found himself biting back a huge grin.

What luck, he’d thought, a few months back, that Yuuri had turned out to be just as much of a hugger as he was.

“First thing in the morning,” Yuuri said, after Victor relaxed his grip enough to let him push himself up on his elbows again.

The grin won out in the end. “Well, maybe not the _very_ first thing,” he said, watching that lovely hint of amusement touch Yuuri’s eyes again.

His hands seemed to find the hem of Yuuri’s T-shirt all on their own once again, and that heady mix of nervousness and excitement hit him once more, like a wave. It made him feel so – _young_ , for lack of a better word, in that moment. And maybe it showed, or maybe they felt the same, because the smile had melted off Yuuri’s face from one moment to the next, and now he was gazing at Victor with eyes that seemed equally dark and bright, and then, for a second, his lips wobbled, but not at all like when he was about to cry.

 _Vulnerable_ , Victor realised, might have been a better word.

He swallowed, but his heart remained in his throat, so he smiled instead. “Do you want to go on?”

Yuuri was so brave, braver than Victor had even anticipated during his first weeks in Hasetsu. It took courage, he knew, to tread on your fears and step towards what you wanted to accomplish. It took even more of it when you walked towards what you wanted to have. And it took so, so much of it, to do all this for something you half told yourself you didn’t deserve. Yuuri had done them all, time and time again, for almost an entire year.

Yet, now, he just added a smaller bit of bravery to the set. He bit his lip, let out a breath, and said what he wanted. “Yes.”

With surprisingly steady hands, Victor pushed Yuuri’s hair behind his ears. It was just long enough for him to tie it now, from time to time. “So serious,” he said, grinning, when that feat was accomplished and he was free to pull Yuuri’s shirt off.

“One of us has to be,” Yuuri said smoothly, afterwards, rising to his knees.

“So _rude_ ,” Victor gasped in mock surprise, letting Yuuri pull his shirt off too. “What would mama say?”

In fitting retaliation, Yuuri left him to scramble to get his head out of the bundle of fabric. “Please don’t mention my mom for the next couple of hours.”

Victor laughed, freeing himself and letting his freshly washed T-shirt end up in a nondescript place on the floor. It set the mood rather suitably for the assortment of endeavours that followed, of kisses and caresses and them laughing at and with each other, of easy jabs turned to hugs turned to embraces turned to them guiding each other’s movements until they found their breaths stutter on their lips.

Also, while Victor was the one of them that had some sort of experience with this kind of thing, he found that it didn’t really matter. The simple fact that he’d happened to have sex years before ( _many_ years, now that he actually thought of it) didn’t make him feel any less nervous or vulnerable or, to be honest, a little bit lost now, just like it wouldn’t have changed the fact he knew now more than ever, as his hands travelled over Yuuri’s warm skin and as Yuuri mapped him right back, that he wouldn’t have been ready for this months ago. He wouldn’t have been ready to get nearly as close as this or open himself this much before they went through the whole process together. Maybe Yuuri could feel all that, since, while he looked as nervous and excited as Victor felt, and while he seemed conscious of his movements, he didn’t seem _self_ -conscious.

Maybe that’s why this was, also, one of the few times when Victor didn’t mind being clumsy, since, by the second time he hit his head on the headboard, he could see that Yuuri was visibly more relaxed. It made Victor feel safe, bumps and all.

“You know,” Victor said at some nonspecific point, once again set back (safely, this time) against the pillows. “I haven’t found myself in this predicament since I was 18, I think,” he said, tugging at the waistband of Yuuri’s sweatpants for added explanation.

Yuuri had only got to his knees because he’d been complaining that his hair got everywhere, and was in the rather futile (Victor ought to know) process of tucking it as well as he could behind his ears. Victor wished he’d just leave it be; it wasn’t like his hands wouldn’t sink into it again as soon as it got in range.

At his words, though, Yuuri did stop, blinking at him for a moment before raising one shoulder with artfully perfected indifference. “Can’t relate,” he said, and leant once more over Victor, who welcomed him back quite readily, threading his fingers through his hair just as he’d promised himself, much to Yuuri’s very mellow chagrin.

Still, Victor found himself curious, and less nervous and more excited than at the beginning, and he dearly wanted to see if he could get a more pronounced feeling out of Yuuri. _Just to try_ , he thought, and deftly turned them around in a swift motion. The start was promising, to say the least, since the first thing Yuuri did when his back hit the pillows was let out a shaky breath.

“What were you thinking about when you were eighteen, Yuuri?” Victor asked, brushing the hair out of Yuuri’s eyes.

Yuuri took a few moments to think, gaze and fingers slowly running over Victor’s face, but in the end he started his answer with an amused and slightly apologetic smile. “I wish I could say something sexy, but I had just moved to Detroit, and I spent that entire year worrying about how I was to get back to Japan for Nationals and finish all my college assignments at the same time too.”

“Fair enough,” Victor said, letting out an amused breath and pressing a kiss to Yuuri’s temple. “I won my first Grand Prix gold that year.” After an annoying several years of silver.

“I know,” Yuuri said, cupping his cheek. “The time difference was so big that I and Phichit almost decided not to bother,” he went on, pushing himself just enough out of the pillows to kiss Victor’s face too. “But we did, in the end.” He let himself fall back down and swallowed a laugh. “I think I cried.”

Victor didn't try to silence his own laughter, but let it fall in ripples into Yuuri’s hair. “I think I cried too, after I got away from the reporters and there was no one else there to see me.” He paused for thought, circling an arm around Yuuri’s shoulder and turning them around back to their initial position. “Well, no one apart from Georgi, who was very distraught to see me like that.”

On second thought, Victor wasn't sure how mentioning Georgi in the situation at hand was any better than mentioning Yuuri’s mom, but Yuuri didn't complain this time. Instead, he just rested his forehead against Victor’s, muttered one of the few endearments in Russian Victor had playfully used for him at some point, and commenced a kissing process that was as deliberate as it was slow, and which in due time left Victor feeling both breathless and like all his joints had turned to his grandma’s kholodets. It was a good thing, no doubt about it, that Yuuri was the one on top.

“Really,” Victor sighed at some later point, a propos of nothing, and took in the look on Yuuri’s face, which probably mirrored his own.

Then it seemed to occur to both of them almost simultaneously that the only reason they were still partly dressed was that they had been too distracted to take everything off, so they first took care of that, with limbs both slightly numb, and jittery, and dully aching from training. They both sported some rather ugly bruises, but nothing too severe, at that moment. There was, Victor dimly thought, something rather comfortingly familiar about them. Which wasn’t to say that they didn’t bat each other’s hands away when they accidentally landed on a distinctly sore spot - but, for the most part, it was good.

It was lovely, actually, with the dimly cool sheets under them as they shifted around, with how warm and soft the contact of skin on skin felt, somehow both familiar and breathtakingly new, with the way their lips never seemed to leave each other, and with how quiet they both were, as if they were careful not to break any kind of feeling lingering in the air. Then, after they both managed to coax each other’s hands into the right rhythm, a process both hindered and facilitated by how their hands were slightly trembling, it got even better, even though it hastened the end of their activities way more efficiently than either of them had expected.

But it was good - even if, when Victor glanced at the bedside clock, he had to let out a helpless laugh at the fact that, supposedly, they ought to be at the rink in less than five hours. When he shared that knowledge with Yuuri, who was sleepily and hopelessly looking around for his T-shirt, he was graced with a fantastically pained whimper, followed by Yuuri effectively burying him in the newly recovered blanket. It also spoke volumes that, when Victor offered that they _could_ afford to run in (very) late, for _once_ , Yuuri barely even protested.

It was all very good, especially since, when Yuuri, after taking ten minutes to regain his breath, complain about sleeping hours, and stare at the moonlit ceiling for a while, suddenly sat up, retrieved his pyjama pants, and got out of bed.

“I’m hungry,” he then explained, and Victor was so tired and happy that he couldn’t stop laughing until Yuuri came back from the kitchen with an assorted plate of sushi rolls, no matter how hard his sides and his jaw hurt from it.

In fact, it even made him find an appetite, at that ungodly hour, and they ended up sharing the food in the midst of their rumpled sheets, as an impromptu moonlit picnic. It was kind of endearing, and he hoped it meant that Yuuri was having a good time, although all evidence seemed to say so. Victor couldn’t remember having a midnight snack after _his_ first time, but he found it to be a wonderful innovation.

“How was Makka?” he asked, grabbing the last tuna roll right from under Yuuri’s fingers.

The half-hearted grumble that came after it only amused him further. “Sleeping on the couch, probably thinking up revenge plans.”

Having not yet raised the roll to his mouth, Victor took the opportunity to clutch at his heart with an exaggerated gasp. “Makkachin would never! He’s a kind-hearted soul.”

“He must have thought the same about you,” Yuuri said, resigning himself to the avocado roll and placing the empty plate on the nightstand.

“You’re strangely accusing, for an accomplice,” Victor grinned, but knocked their shoulders together in a reconciling manner.

Yuuri merely muttered something inaudible in response to that, pulling the blanket free from where it had tangled around their legs. Once again, as he shook some life into it, it seemed to be a matter of moments before he would go out like a light. Victor felt pretty much the same, as he shoved his own bounty in his mouth and closed his eyes to savour it. Their next day was going to have a very, very late start, if he had any say in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The author would like to formally announce that she's only attempted (more or less successfully) to make sushi rolls two days ago, several weeks _after_ writing this. Vague information about how one got to do that has been taken from various websites, and so I cannot give any conclusive source of information. Some research of Lappish restaurants has gone into this too.  
>  Thanks for reading!


	4. May - Part I

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After the immeasurably long ordeal that was chapter 3, I decided to split 4 into two parts. You might ask, What happened to the "short installments" bit, from the summary? I don't know, I would answer.  
> Tags updated, just in case.  
> In this part, Victor and Yuuri make: [✪](http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/seafood-recipes/sweetcorn-and-mussel-chowder/)  
> Enjoy, and thanks for reading :)

Mila really _did_ go to Malta, for around a week, sometime at the very beginning of May, although in the end she just decided to meet there with Sara and a couple other skaters from her division instead of dragging anyone from the team with her. It made Victor start researching possible travel routes for his own personal use more diligently.

“How does Tahiti sound?” he asked Yuuri one morning, scrolling through several websites on his laptop.

“Hot, and out of my price range,” Yuuri said, coming to take a look at the screen, his arm easily finding a comfortable spot over Victor’s shoulders.

With a smile on his face, Victor switched to another tab. “Rome?”

“Maybe. You’ve never been?”

Victor inclined his head. “Not as a tourist. What about Greece?”

“Sounds good.” Yuuri pressed his cheek to his hair, then reached out a hand to click on another link. “What about this?”

“Brussels?” Victor asked, scanning the page. “I heard it’s lovely. Are you sure you don’t want to also go to Madagascar?”

As if he’d said something funny, Yuuri laughed into his shoulder. “We’ll have to choose one,” he said afterwards, as a conclusion.

Victor did a close approximation of a pout. “Only one? Can’t we pamper ourselves a bit?”

There were several moments of thoughtful silence, during which Yuuri kept his cheek pressed to Victor’s shoulder. “We’re going home anyway. I mean, to Hasetsu,” he clarified. “I thought we could spend a few days going by train from one place to another, so I could show you around.”

“I’d like to see Kyoto,” Victor supplied, raising his hand to the one resting on his shoulder and intertwining their fingers.

Yuuri hummed in agreement. “Also, before that,” he hesitated, “I was thinking of going to Bangkok for a few days.”

“Oh,” Victor grinned. “Are you finally taking Phichit up on his offer?” More like, his pleads. Victor, an avid traveller, had no idea how Yuuri had kept himself from visiting for all this time.

“I think so,” Yuuri muttered into his shoulder. He paused for a moment. “Do you want to come?”

Victor shifted a bit to look at him questioningly. “I thought you two were planning on catching up?”

Gaze shifting to a nondescript point on their wall, Yuuri shrugged. “You’d be welcome. And it seemed rude not to ask.”

“I was actually planning on just going ahead home and spending quality time with your parents,” Victor grinned, and his tone made Yuuri’s gaze turn back to him. “Help around, take lots of baths, look at baby pictures…”

“No baby pictures,” he said.

“All the baby pictures,” Victor said, giving his hand a squeeze. Then, a thought illuminated his mind. “I can show you some of mine too, if I remember to ask for them, or if you want to come with me when I visit my grandparents.”

“The ones with the bloody borscht and the army stories?” Yuuri asked, trying to keep his interest polite, but his eyes were bright.

“The ones and only,” Victor grinned. “If the stars align, you might even meet my parents, although it’s hard to catch them in the same country and in the same place at the same time.”

All of this was true, and Victor said it carefreely enough, but that didn’t stop Yuuri from usually getting this very thoughtful look on his face.

“You don’t seem to – be in touch much,” he finally made himself say one day. At Victor’s raised eyebrows, he backtracked, though, both literally and metaphorically. “I mean, I’ve never heard you actually talk to them, but I guess that doesn’t mean you don’t,” he hurried to say, voice getting lower and less intelligible as he neared the end.

Victor had to smile. “We don’t, not a lot,” he reassured him. “It might be a family thing. But that doesn’t mean we don’t like each other.”

“I see,” said Yuuri, after a beat.

Looking at him now, Victor could see that this was, yet again, something Yuuri had difficulty understanding. After only a couple of weeks in Japan, Victor had felt completely overwhelmed by the sheer amount of familiarity that resided in Yuuri’s home. It wasn’t like there was any less of it when Victor visited his own childhood home, because there was, a fierce torrent of familial affection which whirled him around for however many days their winter gathering lasted. No, it was the fact that this familiarity was something that the Katsuki family shared every day of their life. Yuuri had been away from home quite often, but Victor could see, could understand that one had to be fully accustomed to living in the midst of it in order not to feel like they’d been completely thrown out of alignment when they returned to it.

“I’m sure they’d wait for us with at least seven different courses if we tell them we’re coming,” Victor told him, going for reassurance. “Or five intricate take-out orders, at least, if it’s only my parents.”

“So,” Yuuri started, and he pressed his fingers together, seemingly in thought. “Do they know? About –” he didn’t continue verbally, but he didn’t need too, since Victor’s gaze had drifted down to where Yuuri was turning his own ring round his finger.

Victor had last talked to his relatives a couple months before, and, although he thought he remembered telling them something about not living alone anymore, he couldn’t remember if the words _fiancé_ , _wedding_ or _marriage_ had been spoken.

“Probably?” Victor tried, but couldn’t keep it up. “Probably not. Actually, they might know something, but not in so much detail. It will be a surprise.” He said that last thing with a cheeky grin that went completely disregarded.

Yuuri gave him the exact look Victor suddenly expected his parents and grandparents to give him too.

 

It was just the beginning of May, and that meant several things to Victor. One of them was flowers. Granted, that was mostly due to a fleeting glance he’d thrown his surroundings one morning as they made their way through the Ice Palace parking lot. Still, after over a decade of ice skating, Victor knew that inspiration had to be treasured, no matter what forms it took or at what times it came.

They didn’t all follow an exact schedule at the rink, but if they did, there would have been about a quarter of an hour left before they stepped off the ice, when Victor gracefully asked to be let off early and made himself scarce. It was the swiftest change of clothes he’d ever had.

By the time he was out of the final set of doors, there were still around five minutes before Yuuri was used to call it a day. Neither of them was that strict, but Victor could hope. It was a good thing, however, that the object of his inspiration resided relatively close by, in a more or less decently groomed patch of nature at the side of the sports complex. It was the sneakiest and most determined he’d ever gone for a walk in the park.

 

But it was successful, too.

When Victor returned, it was theoretically ten minutes past practice hours. He spent the walk to the locker rooms perfecting his easy smile and his casual gait. When he got to them and opened the door, he found Mila just zipping up her bag, Georgi presumably still nowhere to be seen, Yurio begrudgingly hurrying up so that he could get to school relatively in time, and Yuuri, just having finished tying his shoelaces, raising his head and looking at him.

All his dutiful exercises had been for naught – there was no place for easy smiles when Victor couldn’t help grinning. Grandly, he swung his arms from behind his back and faced Yuuri with an armful of lilac branches crowded with blooms.

“For you,” Victor said, taking in Mila’s hidden laugh and Yurio’s eyeroll.

Yuuri’s eyes drifted from the flowers, rather slowly, back to Victor’s face. “I did wonder where you’d gone.”

Victor would have liked a more breathless reaction, maybe a soft tint of surprise colouring Yuuri’s face as he let out an involuntary syllable, but Yuuri’s restraint in public had gone to incredible lengths over the last few months.

“Don’t you get tired of each other every day at home?” Yurio grumbled (half-heartedly, to those used to him) as he marched past them and out the door.

“Ah,” Victor and his flowers made half a revolution towards him, “don’t you want a ride to school?”

“I’ll take him,” Mila said, in response to him, and passed Victor too, with a bright smile directed at both of them. “Have fun.”

“Good luck, Yura!” Yuuri raised his voice to be heard over Yurio’s grumbling at Mila, therefore gaining some grumbling in his direction too, and then the locker room slipped in a rare, quiet moment.

Victor smiled at him.

Yuuri, eyes drifting back to the flowers now, seemed to unconsciously slip into a softer stance, although Victor couldn’t have pinpointed the changes that have been made for it to seem so. “How did you even manage to take so much? These branches are pretty thick,” Yuuri said, eventually getting up from the bench and coming closer. “Also, without being caught.”

Victor was glad to finally put them in his arms. The sight of Yuuri, bathed in a wild cluster of lilac flowers, was only one of the best things he’d seen in his life, but it was quickly placed rather high up in his list. He’d have to thank Hiroko. And afterwards send her a picture.

“With a lot of determination,” Victor answered him, raising his freshly scratched hands, “and stealth,” he added, with a grin, and hid his hands at his back, so Yuuri could stop looking so worried.

“You didn’t have to,” Yuuri muttered half-heartedly, as if only because he thought it was the polite thing to say, but his face was already half immersed in his impromptu bouquet.

“Of course, it wouldn’t have been as romantic if I did,” Victor replied easily.

He could literally feel a hum of happiness take over his whole being as he watched Yuuri smile at the flowers. “Are you giving yourself compliments because I was too slow to deliver?”

Victor laughed. “Maybe,” he said, and delighted in the lovingly unimpressed look that Yuuri rewarded him with.

Then, he found even more delight as Yuuri leant forward, mindful of the flowers, and pressed his lips to his, just as a smile was blooming on them.

 

The steadily warmer May days were peppered with steadily warmer May mornings. And, after their spur-of-the-moment crash-course the month before, they started occasionally finding themselves unwilling to leave their bed in the early hours of every morning; instead, they’d fumble for a while in the sheets, half wanting to fall asleep again and half curious to see in what ways they could make each other squirm, and oftentimes this would lead to wandering hands and swallowed laughter, and a few lovely moments of panted breaths and whispered words.

It sounded a bit too romantic, even in his head, but Victor couldn’t remember it feeling like this before. Although, maybe it was a bit naïve to say it like that, since, really, Victor’s past experiences could be resumed to two or three interesting nights, during what had probably been one of his last and longest relationships – and the reason Lilia had vowed never to introduce him to violin players again – before he’d gently but surely put his personal life on standby. Moreover, it seemed like the whole experience of making love was too rooted in the other person for him to be able to adequately compare two separate instances.

As an abstraction, sex had never held much of Victor’s interest, as he could do just as well with or without it. As something concrete, to be shared with somebody he loved, it was an entirely different matter. It was lovely to see the changes it brought to their demeanour, how they somehow changed and remained the same during it. It was _fascinating_ , Victor thought, probably making several truer romantics cringe. Eros was supposed to be a surprise, in and of itself, even when Victor was choreographing it for himself, but it had also been this – fascination, curiosity over these feelings that people could create together.

Therefore, he loved the way this fit in his relationship with Yuuri. He loved those quiet mornings, when it was just the two of them (and, sometimes, Makkachin, before he grew tired of them disturbing his sleep and retreated to the living room), he loved that mood in which every clumsy movement or even every longer look at each other made them laugh under their breath, loved seeing Yuuri so relaxed, as warm and pliant in the morning light as Victor himself felt, loved being pulled and kept close, and being awake while daily life still seemed so far away.

He loved the way Yuuri’s hands skimmed over his skin, his hips, his thighs, more curious than anything else, as they slowly made their way through this new, but at the same time quite familiar territory. He loved seeing Yuuri’s eyes flutter shut, when Victor did something particularly right, which he’d promptly commit to memory for a repeat occurrence. He loved that look on Yuuri’s face, in those first couple of mornings, when afterwards he’d blink slowly, a couple of times, as if waiting for embarrassment to kick in, and then actually look a bit surprised when it never did. He loved the fact that it became a playful instinct of his to move his hands so as to shield Victor from once again hitting his head against the bedframe, an action which Victor usually rewarded with an unimpressed look, although warmth always, always bloomed in his chest when it happened.

And it was, they both agreed, a rather pleasant and fun way to start off their day. The sporadic release of tension was amazing and it left both of them feeling more relaxed by the end of it. And there were also those times when Yuuri would find a certain rhythm, and move his hand in such a way that would leave Victor weak-kneed for many minutes after they’d pulled apart, much to Yuuri’s bashful enjoyment.

It was safe to say that Victor hadn’t expected it to be like this, much like many of the things related to Yuuri. For now, there was not a lot of fire or urgency, as it didn’t feel like they were so much trying to quench a desire as they were seeking comfort in each other. It was very different from what Victor had expected, when his curiosity and puzzled feelings of friendship had first turned to infatuation, so many months before. He wondered what would Yuuri say now, if he asked for his opinion about the _Eros_ routine.

Victor didn’t ask. Instead, closing his eyes as Yuuri pressed sleepy kisses to his shoulder, he just said, “What do you want for lunch?”

Yuuri groaned, the unhappy pull of his mouth that Victor couldn’t see still pressed to his shoulder. “Two well-landed quad flips,” he muttered.

Victor opened his eyes for a moment, looking at the mason jar lights hanging over the bed. It was a cloudy day, and 45 minutes past their usual time for leaving the house. He gathered a good bit of their oversized blanket in one hand, and turned with it towards Yuuri, pulling it over both of their heads.

“What else?” he asked, nose pressed to Yuuri’s rather cold cheek.

“Any kind of soup,” Yuuri answered.

That, Victor could manage all on his own.

 

In addition to the usual glare of the ice, the May sunlight that fell in through all the wide windows of the ice rink made Victor squint more than once as he looked around, in search of Yakov. It made Victor wonder, just how much longer he had before he got eyesight problems himself.

But first things first. Months before, they’d reached the compromise of making Victor’s programmes, instead of flamboyant and daunting in a way that would better characterise Yurio at the moment, complete capsules of the best of his skills as he’d showed them throughout the ages. Victor would surprise everyone through his sheer resilience, if nothing else. Furthermore, even without attempting downright life-threatening combinations (Yakov’s words), he was still a long way ahead of most of them.

Still, now Victor wanted to know whether he’d seamlessly made all the necessary improvements to his step sequence in the past several weeks. He’d been learning.

“Good,” Yakov said, when Victor finally found him, surreptitiously (although he denied it vehemently) standing in one of the shadowed corners of the rink. “Now, for the love of God, keep that focus all throughout the competition.”

There was around half a year left before the Grand Prix series started. Victor could invent five types of focus in that time. This was one of the good days.

“Going on vacation anytime soon?” he therefore asked, just to see Yakov’s displeased look at any change or shift from professional to personal life. It reminded Victor of childhood.

“With the five of you the way you are, I’m scared to even consider it anymore,” Yakov grumbled, and shifted his gaze to the rest of the rink.

 _Five_. Victor would have to bring Yuuri this even more conclusive proof that Yakov had completely professionally adopted him. “I was thinking of taking July off,” he offered, casually.

Yakov’s eyes were fixed back on him with piercing gravity. “A whole _month_ ? Are you serious?” he asked, but there was no actual bite behind it, just exasperation and more than a good deal of resignation. After all this time, Victor guessed he’d earned it. “Where would you even go for _a whole month_?” He said it like it was an entire year, but, then again, that wouldn’t have been unjustified either.

“Lots of places,” Victor shrugged, looking back at the rest of the rink too. “And Japan.”

“Of course,” Yakov sighed, and they both watched Yuuri land a cleaner quad Salchow than he had all of last season.

“I have to keep good relations with my future parents-in-law, don’t I?” Victor said, unable to help himself.

The poignant silence that followed on Yakov’s part eventually made him turn his head and see him scrutinising him with an unreadable look. Victor might have played nonchalant most of his career, but it was impossible not to be affected when you had that look directed at you. Instead of squirming, though, he smiled.

Yakov’s scowl deepened. “I hope this is not just one more of your impulsive decisions taking the better of you.”

Victor’s very first coherent thoughts at hearing that were, _How long have you been thinking that?_ The second, he spoke out loud. “It’s not.”

After glaring at him some more, Yakov let out some of the tension from his shoulders. “It didn’t seem like it, but one had to make sure, with you,” he said, back in his nagging parent tone and looked away, to where Yurio was apparently commenting on Mila’s step sequence.

“I’m not _that_ rash,” Victor said, following the scene with a smile.

“Of course you’re not, you’ve just always liked to let others think so,” Yakov said, unsurprisingly perceptive. “I just hope I live long enough to see you settle down,” he added after a long pause.

That _did_ catch Victor by surprise. “Really?”

“Yes,” Yakov groused, as if it had been physically painful for him to show that spark of affection. “But don’t rush it, Goddamn it, on my account!”

Victor blinked at him wide eyes. “We won’t!” he said, raising his gloved hands in defence, and feeling a breath of laugher get into his voice. “But I’m sure you have plenty more years to live, Yakov, you’re in the prime of your life.”

“I lost every semblance of a prime when I first took you all under my wing, don’t you try to flatter me,” Yakov said, passing him his water bottle.

 

It stood with Victor for several days, that entire conversation, before he decided to let some of it out. “What did your parents think of me, when I first came there?” he asked Yuuri, the following Saturday afternoon.

Yuuri was his chosen kitchen assistant today (as if he’d had a say in the matter) and currently “finely chopping” various vegetables at the dining table, while Victor was busy preparing a decently-sized potful of fish stock, at the kitchen counter. At the question, he raised his eyes to look at Victor over his glasses for a moment, before going back to carefully slicing and deseeding a chilli pepper.

“My dad pulled me aside to ask me why I didn’t tell them I’d invited somebody over, so they could have had your room ready,” Yuuri said, turning the slices around and chopping them this time. “My mom said you looked even more handsome than in the posters.”

Victor grinned, sieve in hand. “Do I?”

He got one more over-the-glasses look (and now he wondered whether Yuuri could actually see him fine like that or if he just liked the dramatic effect), but Yuuri turned back to his chopping board before replying. “Yes.”

“So many photographers clutched their hearts in dismay,” Victor declared, grin wider, making Yuuri laugh as he set aside the chilli and took two sticks of celery out of his assigned bowl of ingredients. “And after that?”

It took a while for Yuuri to go on, and Victor saw him gnawing at his lip as he sliced and diced and chopped away. “I think,” Yuuri eventually said, and Victor stopped straining the stock in order to listen to him. “I think, at first, they mostly waited to see how _I_ felt about – well, _everything_ , before giving any personal opinions. Then, by the time I finally made up my mind, you’d been there for several weeks, so they’d already grown to like you.”

Victor hummed and decided to go ahead and strain the rest of the pot. “They seem to like most people,” he noted.

To his surprise, Yuuri snorted. “They don’t. The reason you only met nice people at the _onsen_ was because they were the ones welcome.” Yuuri raised his head, and he must have seen Victor’s shock etched on his face, because he quickly backtracked. “I don’t mean to say they _dislike_ a lot of people. Just, you know, the ones that might cause trouble, that much is normal. They’re usually nice to most people, though.”

Here, he shrugged, and stopped dangerously brandishing his knife in the air. Victor had been eyeing it quite worriedly for most of that explanation.

“What I meant to say is…they’re _usually_ nice, but they actually _liked_ you.” Victor nodded at that, but Yuuri fixed him with a knowing, yet somewhat confused smile. “What is it you want to hear?”

“Details,” he answered promptly, and put the pot aside.

Celery done, Yuuri picked up an onion, thought for a moment, and then started talking just as he did chopping. “My dad kept saying you had nimble fingers and that we ought to teach you how to play some stringed instrument. My mom really liked that you kept giving Makkachin attention at all times, although she also kind of suspected you did so because he was the only one you knew there and you were kind of lonely. Dad had also wanted to ask you to go out with him and meet some of his friends several times, but wasn’t confident enough in his English. Mari kept asking me how come you didn’t seem the least worried about the rent you still had to pay at home. Mom occasionally left sweets on the counter because she thought they would help you feel better, and she also liked how you pronounce your vowels.” He added the chopped onion over the chilli and the celery, and looked up. “Like that?”

Victor nodded again, this time staring at him. “It sounds as if your mother thought I was a really sad person,” he eventually said, and Yuuri shrugged, vaguely apologetic. “She wasn’t wrong, but somehow it’s still unexpected.”

“She’s had lots of practice,” Yuuri said, with false amusement.

Victor inspected the kitchen counter.

It was these tiny bits of casual information they both threw at each other from time to time that made Victor wish they could go a few years back in time for even five minutes to give each other some sort of reassurance. _It’s okay. It’s going to get better. There’s more than this moment_. Then, he was back to the present, watching Yuuri grimace at his hands, and he was once again flooded with relief that, somehow, his life had reached this point anyway.

“Then, on the bright side, at least she’ll have an easier time with me,” Victor offered.

It earned him a more genuine smile. “You’re not as difficult to deal with as you think.” When Victor raised an eyebrow at him, Yuuri rolled his eyes. “For _most_ people. I have difficulties dealing with nearly everything.”

“Maybe that’s why you end up dealing with it all so well,” Victor said, easily, and smiled to himself when Yuuri rolled his eyes again, with even more gusto.

With familiar reluctance, Victor focused back on his work, which now entailed opening a can of sweetcorn (he might have been cheating, there, but he hadn’t found the time to scour the market for any fresh corn; he suspected it wasn’t even its season). Yuuri had just finished dicing one of the two potatoes Victor had given him, along with everything else, but now he looked at the second one and seemed to reach a decision. Then, he offered Victor the bowl of chopped ingredients without attempting to touch that one.

“Are we going off track?” Victor asked, leaning over the counter to take the bowl from him.

“You’ve been feeding me too many carbs, anyway,” Yuuri sighed.

“You need them,” Victor replied instinctively, but then attempted to sound affronted. “And I’ve only cooked three or four times since you moved in!”

“And it’s all been very tasty each time, and my caloric intake has been keeping me up at night,” Yuuri countered smoothly, going round the table so as to get to the kitchen area.

“I’m sure your caloric intake is fine,” Victor muttered, and blinked when Yuuri pressed his fingers to his mouth for a moment.

“Says the one who managed to keep in shape for an entire year off the ice to the one gone down the drain in three months,” Yuuri said in a more characteristic mutter, as he drew his hand away and went to the kitchen sink.

“Barely!” Victor countered, turning after him. “I— _Ow_!” He raised a hand to his mouth and shot a scandalised look at Yuuri’s shaking shoulders.

“That chilli pepper must have been hotter than we thought, I could still feel it on my hand,” Yuuri said once he’d stopped snickering, as he scrubbed away at his fingers in the sink.

“ _Ow_ ,” Victor said more pronouncedly now, although the burn wasn’t quite that bad after the initial shock subsided. He pressed his fingers tentatively to his lips. “Yuuri Katsuki’s heart is colder than the ice he performs stunning, record-breaking routines on,” he said darkly. “The media has it all wrong. Give him your heart and he’ll shatter it in a thousand pieces to adorn his costumes.” He looked at Yuuri now, who was finding it harder and harder to control his laughter. “He’ll take your naïve and pure feelings and crush them under his skates during one of his critically acclaimed step sequences.”

“Especially the naïve ones,” Yuuri said between breaths of laughter, wiping a tear from the corner of his eye.

Victor grinned even more, turning to where Yuuri was leaning back against the kitchen sink and putting his hands on either side of him. “Especially them,” he said, and kissed him.

It was one of the most welcome aspects of living alone and having some time for themselves, that Yuuri could be so wonderfully relaxed as he kissed him in return, a smile on his lips and pulling away every now and then just to playfully nuzzle Victor’s cheek. It was intoxicating the same way sitting under blooming vines of Jasmine in summer was intoxicating; so Victor let himself kiss and be kissed more, thoroughly unhurried and content — until Yuuri placed his hands on his hips and, with a sweet and innocent smile, reminded him that he still had mussels to shell and a soup to make.

 

To indulge him, Victor made a show of surgically adding only the needed few drops of olive oil to the saucepan in which he afterwards poured all of Yuuri’s carefully chopped work. Yuuri laughed, but capped the bottle of oil anyway, for good measure, and stirred the ingredients a bit while Victor drained the can of corn and then added it and the begrudgingly diced potato on top of the others.

“Do you actively look for those recipes, or do they just pop up on your feed?” Yuuri asked, after being ushered away to wash the mussels one more time.

“A little bit of both,” Victor said, gently tipping the fish stock into the saucepan. Once he was done and his attention was no longer elsewhere, though, he turned back to him. “I mean, of course I look for them! I’m completely dedicated!”

“Of course,” Yuuri said, grinning, washing the mussels and thus making quick work of something that had taken Victor a considerable amount of time to get the hang of. Island-side born and raised, and it showed. “Is Yurio joining us for this?”

Victor stirred the soup-in-progress; the fish stock had still been pretty hot, so it would all soon enough be brought to a boil. After that, he’d have to let it simmer for around ten minutes. “Mm, not this time,” he said.

“Thought so, he has the weirdest attitude towards shellfish,” Yuuri commented and placed the bowl of now harmless mussels on the counter.

Victor raised a shoulder, stirring the soup some more. “Actually, I didn’t ask him.” He lowered the flame.

“Oh,” Yuuri said, and Victor could hear a faint reminder of the Yuuri from several months ago, surprised whenever people genuinely seemed to want to spend time with him. “Okay.”

“His finals are coming up one of these weeks, aren’t they?” Victor asked, stirring the soup a bit to see if anything had stuck to the bottom.

Yuuri made a non-committal sound, this time leaning on the counter connected to the cooker, not seeming in any hurry to go to the more comfortable area of the couch when he could stay right there, with Victor within arm’s reach. “I think so, yes. You’ll have to remember to help him with those courses he mentioned.”

Victor blinked at him. “Me? Why me? Here, try this.”

“Because you offered,” Yuuri almost rolled his eyes, then bent to try the spoonful of soup Victor had offered him. “Pepper,” he said, when he straightened back up.

“Right,” Victor said, passing him the spoon and going to look for the mill. “And, yes — yes, I think I remember, now. We’ll invite him over next week and give him exhaustive tutoring.”

“Definitely,” Yuuri said, in that completely unconvinced tone. “What’s next, after this?”

“Simmer for 10 minutes,” Victor recited, returning to grind pepper into the soup, “and blend them all together.”

“What about these?” Yuuri asked, inclining his head towards the bowl of lovingly washed mussels.

“Add them afterwards, then cook it all for a few minutes more.”

Yuuri blinked. “That’s it?”

Victor glanced at him with a grin, and then put the pepper mill aside. “And just a little bit of cream,” he admitted, and was quick to run his hands soothingly over Yuuri’s arms when he started whimpering.

 

The thing about Yuuri, however, was that he enjoyed food ( _unfamiliar_ food too) as much as Victor did. The difference was that Victor had never felt particularly guilty about whatever it was he tried, a thing which Yuuri firmly believed was rooted in his obscenely convenient metabolism. Therefore, no matter how much he complained, Victor still got to see him eventually give in and just enjoy his meal. That was great, since (1) Victor got to see his pleased face, a sight for sore eyes and face muscles, and (2) it meant that whatever Victor had made was comestible and greatly appreciated.

So, as the sun started to set outside the windows in their living room, they indulgently seated themselves on the couch along with their soup bowls and watched it descend over the city, Makkachin dozing at their feet. Victor wanted to preserve that moment in a snow globe. In lack of that, he took a couple of pictures with Yuuri’s phone before discarding it to some place or other.

“It’s very good,” Yuuri said, after his second spoonful of soup, because he was learning all about rewarding responses lately. “It feels like – like having a meal in a cabin by the seaside, in the early evening.”

He was learning _too fast_ . Victor’s eyes shone, first with pleasure, and then with the sparkling starburst of an idea. “ _Yuuri_! You’re full of great ideas! That’s it!”

“What?” Yuuri asked, warily, pressing his empty spoon to his lips.

Victor shifted a bit, because he had to, he was fizzling with excitement, holding his bowl safely in his hands, to face Yuuri better and press his feet against his thigh. “Let’s book a seaside cabin for a couple of weeks. Just you, me, Makkachin, a dozen seagulls, and endless swims.”

He saw Yuuri worry his lip behind the spoon for a few decisive moments, before he lowered it, along with his gaze, to the soup. “Alright.”

Surprised, but more than hopeful, Victor pressed his toes deeper into his thigh, not even minding the dull pain that came with it. “Really?” When Yuuri, raising another spoonful to his mouth, nodded and, looking at him, sketched a small smile, it felt like they were already on their honeymoon. “Great! I’ll look for several and then we can pick the one we like best. Does the country matter? I guess it would be nice for it to be warm enough to bathe, but not too warm, since then we’d be sluggish all day, although maybe that won’t be so bad…” He was already, involuntarily, making to go and get his laptop for in-depth research, but Yuuri, transferring his bowl and spoon swiftly in one hand, held on to his legs with the other.

“Later,” Yuuri said, an amused, but otherwise fond smile on his lips.

Victor leant back against the pillows gathered on the couch, mimicking his smile. “Later?”

Yuuri nodded and, satisfied that Victor was not going anywhere, returned his attention to his meal and his gaze to the dusk outside. Victor, in all truth equally satisfied not to be going anywhere, followed his example, and raised his spoon to his mouth. The soup was _good_ , just the right amount of salt and spices for his tastes, and it surprised him a bit, against all odds; and now, along with it, he could also taste the gradually more tangible notion of their approaching holiday.

 

The following week, Yuuri taught him how to dance quickstep.

It was in one of Lilia’s ballet studios, after their practice ended, and before the next group was due. It had to be, since Victor’s apartment, mournfully, was all too small for anything as expansive as this. For the possibility of Victor being leisurely led and spun around the room and for the sheer force of nature Yuuri was when dancing.

“Now turn,” Yuuri said, but merely as an afterthought, since he hadn’t really bothered with explanations after the preliminary ones, given before he’d actually took Victor’s hand and started just showing him the way. As if everything else slipped his mind, once he got moving.

Even if Victor’s modus operandi was mastering something before he ever showed it to someone else, or just doing things well, if he did them at all, he found that he didn’t really mind being bad at this now, when he was with Yuuri. Because he truly _was_ a horrible partner, the cheery music and near-running steps, coming after a day full of exhausting exercises, eventually causing unrelenting bursts of laughter to come out of him, which he sometimes tried to stifle into Yuuri’s shoulder, contrary to the necessary posture, but mostly just let them run free, in the empty, sunlit room.

“You’re not concentrating,” Yuuri said, chastising, but one could hear it in his voice, how he was trying not to laugh too.

“Neither are you,” Victor said, schooling his features into something more dignified.

Yuuri huffed, as if he’d really wanted to sound offended, but couldn’t, and turned them around once more. There really weren’t that many steps to it, when compared to some other dances Victor had had to fool people into thinking he was only out of touch with, rather than completely new at, throughout the ages – Victor knew _some_ dances: mostly waltzes, and Paso Doble if he was in a good mood, like he had been that first time with Yuuri, but it wasn’t like he would have publicly admitted to not knowing how to Foxtrot when he was seventeen – there weren’t that many steps, but they were quick, and continuous, and out of the two of them, it wasn’t Victor who had the most acclaimed step sequences, no matter how hard Yuuri tried to deny it.

“Heel first, heel first, we’re going forward,” Yuuri said, eyes on their footwork.

“Were you so unforgiving with your partner from when you first learned?”

Yuuri let out an amused breath. “She was better than me.” Then, before they reached the other end of the studio, he stopped, and Victor had to grin. “Ready?”

“Of course.” Victor grinned even more. He liked this part.

They waited, just because they could, for the music to get to a more animated part, and then Yuuri grinned back at him, and kicked back their legs, in a more or less synchronised fashion. It was just that side of fun Victor loved about dancing.

“Too slow, you’re not in rhythm,” said Yuuri, as if just to dampen the mood.

“You sound like Lilia,” Victor said, to give him a taste of his own medicine, getting a light shove for it, and then chanced to spin them around, out of his very own volition. “Am I really that bad?” he nevertheless – naturally – asked, after another few moments.

“No,” Yuuri (hopefully) admitted, looking down at their feet, but then raising his eyes and giving Victor a smile. “You’re doing alright. I was worse.”

Victor resisted the urge to roll his eyes, but just barely. “You always say that, and I have yet to see any evidence of it.”

It got a breath of laughter out of Yuuri. “You saw plenty of it last year.”

“Not true,” Victor said, wishing he already knew enough to lead them, to lead Yuuri away, round and round the room, until he left all these doubts way behind him. “You were doing alright, even before I got there.”

This time, Yuuri’s laugh was even more pronouncedly bitter. “Right. That’s what you call it.”

The music was still going on the background, happy and energetic, as it had been before, and Yuuri was now almost absent-mindedly taking them through the basic steps, at a much slower pace than he had, even at the very start. Victor didn’t know when the change had occurred.

“Yuuri,” he said, tentative, because he had a history of saying the wrong things at wrong times, even if he liked to think he was getting better. “What’s wrong?”

Yuuri shrugged, his left foot nudging Victor’s right one a bit to the side. Victor held the hand he’d been holding all throughout this practice tighter. From all the facets he’d seen of him so far, Yuuri’s downturned face told him he didn’t want to talk about it. And yet:

“I’m not good in the off-season,” he eventually said, guiding Victor through a couple more half-hearted steps.

Victor frowned, accepted it when Yuuri eventually stopped moving and lowered their hands, but still held on to his. “Not good how?”

“Just not good,” he shrugged again. “Generally.”

 _That’s not true_ , Victor wanted to say, almost instinctively. The words were there on his tongue, as if from a script he held in his mind, an array of lines easy at hand, whenever a conversation needed a shortcut, a quick reply. He just managed to hold them back in time, because he knew they wouldn’t help. They were as empty as any other unthought line from that repertoire, so why should he say it, when he could say something that could actually do Yuuri some good?

He wished he knew what that other thing to say was, though.

And it was a bit funny, this whole train of thought, because, when Yuuri finally looked up from their interlocked hands, whatever he saw on Victor’s face made his own open up a bit more, turn softer and warmer with a reassuring smile – when all Victor had wanted was to find a way to be reassuring himself. It was slightly unfair, but Victor loved him so much for it.

“I’ll be okay. I’m just tired, right now, I guess,” Yuuri tried to brush it off, gaze turning to the empty studio around them, where a few specs of dust glinted like gold in the sunlight. “Do you want one more try, or…?”

Victor looked at him, feeling his chest ache just as his heart bloomed. He still didn’t know.  He would have to think about it more. “Do you know one with more dips?”

After a beat, Yuuri raised an eyebrow at him. “You want me to dip you?”

“So much.”


	5. May - Part II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ends with June, but apparently not _in_ June, because writing's close to non-existent when it gets hot outside. But, still, one month to go.  
>  If Tsarkoe selo can't actually be visited in such depth, then you have my apologies for the mistake.  
> For pelmeni recipes, ask your local grandparents or whoever you know who knows how they're made, because I certainly don't.  
> Thanks for reading, and enjoy!

During the next couple of days, Victor thought about and against calling somebody. Yuuri’s mom, maybe, or Yuuko, possibly Minako. He’d also, sparingly, thought about calling Phichit, but he knew where  _ his  _ loyalties lay, in case this was a bad idea. And, then again, he didn’t feel like this was the best thing to do, discussing Yuuri with others without even giving Yuuri the time and chance to talk about it on his own. So, Victor didn’t call.

Instead, later that week, he took them to Tsarskoe selo.

It was a lovely, sunny day, as he thought it ought to be, in May, the temperature kind enough for hoodies and thin coats, the air just humid enough, and the wind forgiving, for once. It might have had something to do with the fact that, in going out of Saint Petersburg, they had also got farther away from the coast, with its steady currents. The niceness of the day caused a pang of guilt in Victor’s chest at having left Makkachin with Yurio, for company, but he didn’t want to risk losing sight of him on these spacious grounds. Moreover, he also kind of wanted to give Yuuri his undivided attention today.

Yuuri, who, ever since they got out of the car and made their way around the streets of Pushkin until they got to Catherine Park, had been bright-eyed with wonder and curiosity. He hadn’t looked particularly down these past couple of days, really, but Victor had been surprised by a newfound instinct within himself, one that could apparently sense some underlying worry in the softness that had settled over Yuuri’s features after their dance lessons.

Maybe he was making it all up, but it didn’t feel like he was, especially when he remembered all the moments Yuuri’s hands had lingered in his lately, warm and gentle, but also seeming to be looking for comfort without being very conscious of it. Yuuri certainly didn’t seem to be particularly aware of it either - or, if he was, it looked like he’d made up his mind to deal with it on his own. Which Victor hoped wasn’t the case

In any case, it was nice to have a day only for themselves, to get away from their routine, and chores, and forever postponed laundry, and the bustle of the city, for only a few hours. It kind of made Victor realise that, all in all, the two of them hadn’t been on that many dates yet.

“It’s not as crowded as it was the last time I came here,” Victor said now, as they walked at a leisurely pace down the park alleys, green and fresh and invigorating. “Though that was late summer. What do you think?”

“It makes me wish we had a garden,” Yuuri said, looking at the canopy with an easy smile on his face. “Very calming.”

“We’d have to move quite far into the countryside, if you want one this big,” Victor offered, casually, and smiled to himself too when Yuuri chuckled. A smile which only widened when he felt fingers slipping between his.

They zig-zagged over canals, seemingly drawn by every bridge, they walked twice up and down the same alley when Victor thought they’d missed one, they went around the lake, giving in and taking a few pictures, mostly for their friends, who’d expressed their complaints at apparently being ignored, and for Yuuri’s family, who were always eager to see more of them (and Yuuri was just now starting to assimilate this). It was a lovely place to spend a free day in, and they both seemed to take their time with everything, walking, in silent agreement, at a much slower pace than either of them was used to.

When they got to the Catherine Palace, and Victor asked him if he wanted to go in, Yuuri’s response was a vigorous nod, but first they stood in front of it, admiring the blue, ornate façade in the midday sun. There were a few more people here, but, given how immense it all was, it didn’t feel like an inconvenience of any sort. It was a calmer soft of civilisation, after experiencing the rush hours of Saint Petersburg.

“My family would like this place,” Yuuri said, still looking forwards. “It’s just the kind of grand one would expect of Europe.”

Victor hummed, eyes trained on the baroque elements he’d been seeing more or less regularly since he was a child. He remembered coming at least once a year this way with his parents, when they didn’t have any better idea, and they wanted to leave the house and get enough fresh air to last them until the next gap in their schedules.

“Well, then we’ll have to remember to bring them here, when they’ll be around,” he offered.

Yuuri smiled, fondly, at the intricate façade. “And how do you expect to be able to tear them away from the inn long enough to actually bring them all the way here?”

Victor glanced at him, subtly, and then went on gazing until Yuuri turned to look at him too, at which point he smiled. “With a wedding?”

Yuuri’s eyes widened. “Oh,” he only said, before looking away again.

And it was wonderful to see that he was blushing. Proximity and growing familiarity had rendered both of them (although it was more evident with Yuuri) less liable to flustered blushes over the past few months, and as much as Victor loved to see how comfortable they had got around each other, he had to admit, now, that he’d kind of missed this. He barely resisted poking Yuuri’s cheek, he was  _ that _ proud of himself.

“Of course, we needn’t wait that long. I’m sure we could compel them to visit sooner, if we ask very nicely,” he went on.

“Of course,” Yuuri said, eyes back on the façade, but he did take a step back to let their shoulders knock together, leaning slightly into Victor before taking off, hands clasped behind his back, towards the entrance.

The galleries and halls were adequately enormous, and took up quite a portion of their time, at the leisurely pace they were still keeping. Yuuri, however, got a bit more talkative as time went on, either pointing out bits of architecture to Victor or just recounting various things that seemed to come to his mind, like his first museum visits with Phichit in Detroit, that time his dad had had a strange fixation with decorative vases, or how his mother had once shown him the wonderful array of dresses she had from her youth.

It was all spoken in a soft voice, wonder and fondness passing like uneven ripples through it, and Yuuri’s eyes were bright and lovely, so it was only to be expected that Victor found it a bit difficult to look away, from time to time, found it difficult not to hang on every word.

“What is it?” Yuuri asked, the third time he caught him in the act.

Victor smiled, instinctively, openly. “Nothing, just happy you’re feeling better.” Which was more than he’d intended to say, as he realised the instant the words left his mouth, but he forced his smile to stay in place.

On his part, Yuuri first looked confused, then thoughtful, and lastly unreadable, as he seemed to make sense of Victor’s answer.

“Oh, you mean from a few days ago?” Much like Victor, he schooled a smile onto his face, whether it wanted to be there or not. It looked a bit sheepish and a bit guilty. “Don’t worry about that. That’s just – one of my seasonal moods…”

“Seasonal moods?” Victor raised an eyebrow, which Yuuri couldn’t see now, since he was looking away, more sheepish than guilty now.

“Yeah,” he muttered, embarrassed. “It happens, around this time of year.”

Victor pondered it for a moment. “Because of the off-season?”

Yuuri nodded. “Because of the off-season.” But he didn’t add anything more, and Victor metaphysically bit his cheek against prying.

“Well, if there’s anything I can do…,” he offered, nevertheless, and felt a bit sheepish himself as Yuuri waved his hands at an almost comical speed in front of him.

“No, no, that’s okay. I’m okay now.” He sighed, but then his gaze went outwards again, back to the marble hall and its painted walls and high ceiling, and a more genuine smile came back to his lips. “This is nice.”

It was like a glass of lemonade in summer, in the way it loosened up nerve endings Victor hadn’t even realised were tense. He wondered, not for the first time, whether Yuuri was aware of doing this, comforting others when they were trying to comfort him, and whether he knew how good he was at it, in those mindless moments.

After Catherine Palace, what followed was the Alexander Park, which occupied the relatively short amount of time left until early evening. The wind had picked up, but the sky was still clear above them, and the trees and shrubberies and even the lake seemed to shudder pleasantly with every breeze. Maybe they had been cooped up in the city for too long, after spending the best part of the year before in the sleepy, warm and open space that was Hasetsu.

This day was a very enjoyable reminder of their approaching return.

It was a refreshing enough feeling that it was not until they were on their way out of Alexander Park when they realised they had completely just bypassed lunch. Victor blinked at the realisation.

“What do you want for dinner?”

Yuuri first raised his eyes to the sky, as if in contemplation, and then closed them with a sigh as profound as it was quiet. “Yakitori.”

Instantly, Victor had to follow his lead, sigh and close his eyes. “Yeah, me too.”

When he looked back at him, Yuuri was giving him a vaguely amused look, as if he couldn’t believe he was real, but he was indulging himself. “Short of that, some goulash would be nice too.”

“That,” Victor said, “I don’t know how to make.”

The look of sheer surprise Yuuri directed at him, sadly enough, had to be fabricated, so Victor offered him a displeased grimace right back. The returned smile, paradoxically, both confirmed his suspicions and mellowed down the offence.

“I would never have guessed,” Yuuri said, grin becoming cheeky.

Victor didn’t gratify him with a reply, just shrugged and looked away, since silence was far better at evoking the whole lot of hurt his ego must have hypothetically been feeling.

“I knew a recipe, at some point,” Yuuri said, tentative, after they turned onto another alley, on their way back to Catherine Park, and, from there, to their car. “We could probably scrape up a pretty decent one, I don’t think there are any strict rules.”

This time, Victor’s shrug was more genuine. “Or find that restaurant we jogged by three weeks ago and see if they have any.”

Yuuri hummed in agreement, although he didn’t sound convinced. “I don’t feel like dressing up and going away at night when I could get the same result after chopping carrots in my pyjamas, with my dog in my lap. At least, not today.” However, after a moment he seemed to catch himself, and directed a horrified look Victor’s way. “You’ve  _ spoiled _ me!”

Victor smiled. “I had to find alternative ways, after the fifth time you refused to visit my favourite gourmet places.”

Not quite true, since he’d never thought that deeply about it, but he found this to be a brilliant outcome. There were enough times when he, too, didn’t feel like doing anything more than laze about in the wonderfully comfortable clothes he’d been borrowing from Yuuri on a daily basis ever since he’d moved in. He patted his shoulder now, in a more than vague attempt at being comforting.

“This is what we’ll do. We’ll make dinner at home today, and the next time we really want to go out somewhere, we do, no exceptions.”

Yuuri glanced at him. “Even in the middle of the Yakov’s death drills?”

“ _ Especially _ during those,” Victor grinned, then grabbed his hand and pulled him at a faster pace over a bridge, and back into their newfound idyllic world.

That had been a feasible, small plan, eventually brought to completion. The larger ones soon proved not to be going along quite as well, as Victor in particular found a very steadfast obstacle in their path.

“Not a chance.”

“No?”

“Not one. And who do you think you are, not to discuss it with me too?”

“See, you found out anyway –”

“That is not the right answer, and even you must know that well enough.”

It was Lilia who had cornered him on his way from the changing rooms to the ballet studio. Apart from Yakov, she was the only one Victor knew who could corner somebody on a well-lit corridor, with open doorways and windows, and chattering people ambling around them. He had to admire her presence, even if it was the same presence who happened to have something to say against his approaching holiday.

“You know the busiest summer courses are in July, you’ve  _ been _ to them. I cannot let this go on.”

“We’ve already got plane tickets,” Victor lied, wide eyed and innocent.

Lilia grimaced, as if such trifles were beneath her. “Nothing that cannot be arranged. I’m not allowing you to borrow my  _ perfectly _ qualified instructor for a month and a half.”

Here was a problem. Lilia must have noticed Victor’s struggle to say anything against a statement that also attested his fiancé’s worth – she was clever like that. The effort to keep arguing made Victor grimace too.

“It’s the  _ first _ and  _ only _ time,” he said, then realised something, and just blinked at her. “And why are you talking to  _ me _ about this?” This was also the moment he realised that, instinctively, they had both been stage whispering.

Lilia seemed to just realise that too, judging by the exasperated look on her face. “Because if I tell him he’ll get that  _ look _ on his face, like I’m asking him to leave his family and go to war, and he’ll only give me some vague, resigned answer, which is worse than a complete refusal, coming from him.”

“You  _ are _ asking him to leave his family and go to war,” Victor said, leniently.

They were still furiously whispering. Lilia looked like, if she’d had a newspaper nearby, she would have swatted at Victor with it. It was amusing, to see her like this, it was almost reminiscent of Yurio, but he wished his holiday was not at stake for it.

“Please,” he tried, as a last resort. “It’s our honeymoon rehearsal.”

Despite his most tear-wrenching stares, she looked totally unimpressed, and she might have just gone on telling him what she specifically thought about his plans, but at that moment Yuuri (and Yurio, a few paces behind him) chose to peek down the hallway, two doors away from them.

“Um, sorry, can we start?”

Victor was lucky enough to have front seats at the spectacle that was Lilia, putting on her prim and proper attitude after whisper-shouting in her very own Ballet Academy, just to avoid making one of her pupils look upset.

“Yes, go ahead,” she said over her shoulder, back to her usual self. She still swatted Victor’s arm as she went away. “Off, off you go.”

If Victor also chose to take that as her unofficial permission to go on holiday too – well, she should have expected it.

Yurio had been busier than any teenager had a right to be, in Victor’s opinion, this past year and a half. Season over, medals proudly displayed in his room, cat well-fed and ready for presumable cuddles (Victor didn’t know, he’d never had one), he could still hardly find a moment to breathe. Or that was what it looked like, sometimes. Yurio’s take on the off-season was as the period he could finally go all out, without being extra careful about not pulling any muscles. Mixed with the approaching end of the school year, it turned him into quite the little ball of nerves. Or that was what it looked like.

However, when Victor, on their way back from a morning run-cum-coffee buying errand, asked Yuuri what he thought about it, he got the same concerned look mirrored back at him.

“He needs to wind down,” Yuuri said, and Victor nodded alongside him.

That was it, then. Yuuri’s opinion, when it came to stressful periods, might have just as well been catalogued as professional advice.

Therefore, because he hadn’t come by in quite a few weeks, they started inviting Yurio over. At first, they were met with scowled refusals, but – Victor knew – there were only so many times one person could say no to Yuuri’s smiling face and hold onto their humanity.

One hour into his second visit in a while, Yurio started making pelmeni. Victor was a very active observer.

“Oh, my grandpa didn’t make them like that, he used to kind of  _ twist _ them around,” Victor made a motion with his hands as he explained.

Scowling at the boiling water, Yurio made a dissatisfied sound. “Yeah, well – I don’t know how to do it like that. We always made them bigger.”

“Ah, no, I wasn’t criticising, just sharing information,” Victor smiled, waving his hands, but it didn’t make Yurio look any less dissatisfied.

“I  _ know _ that, just –” he let out something between a sigh and a groan, and started angrily rolling each circle into an even larger one. “Do you really have to watch over my shoulder like a hawk?”

Victor blinked, all innocence. “I’m learning!”

“You’re leeching,” Yurio narrowed his eyes at him, and that, at last, was a bit of his less stressed, but still perpetually annoyed self.

Victor might have taken a moment to pat himself on the back for finally getting him to unwind a bit, had Yuuri not just come out of the bedroom right at that moment, his usual running clothes on and Makkachin following in tow, and hurried past them and out the front door without as much as a glance their way. For a few moments, Yurio and Victor were caught blinking at the invisible trail left in their wake.

“What was…that?” Yurio said, slowly, still staring.

Victor stared a bit more too. “I’m…not sure.” Then, after another moment to gather his thoughts, he made to go back to the task at hand.

Only to find Yurio this time frowning at him. “You’re not  _ sure _ ?” But the sheer act of looking at Victor seemed to drain every ounce of patience he had been nursing, and went back to rolling dough without adding anything more aside from a few disgruntled breaths.

For want of something to do, Victor checked his phone. “It’s about the usual time,” he offered, after looking at it. “…more or less.”

“ _ More or less _ ,” he heard Yurio mutter over the rolling pin.

It was so low it could have easily been missed, had the apartment not been strangely quietened by the lack of another body and a big dog. Victor let him run through whatever went through his mind at his own pace, deciding to occupy himself by seasoning the minced meat prepared as filling. Maybe he ought to turn up the volume on the television, to keep them company alongside the sound of bubbling water.

“ _ Not sure _ . I thought you people  _ talked _ about this stuff. Have you learnt nothing from last year? You can’t just – let him run all his ideas in his head by himself. You know they will derail more than those trains you had to take to the countryside which felt as if they were losing half their pieces along the way.”

Victor wanted to point out that he was not nearly old enough to have seen the really bad ones, but he kept himself in check. “It’s not that bad, Yura. It’s just –” He stopped, because in this Yurio had been right: he did not know. “– seasonal melancholy,” he finished, nevertheless.

“Bullshit,” Yurio said, but turned back to mumbling while sticking together the margins of the first batch. “Just damn talk to each other. Otherwise what’s the damn point?”

Victor made to say something back, but stopped halfway through and stared.

It was then, really, that Victor realised that, all in all, Yurio didn’t really have anyone his age around to talk with. The trials of being the youngest contestant in the Senior Division,  _ that  _ Victor was familiar with – but while it was true that both of them had started off rather young, it was also true that Victor had had a better fitted personality for social interactions even from the beginning. It had been hard, and daunting, and frustrating, but Victor couldn’t remember ever lacking someone to talk to. He was always so good-humoured people  _ wanted _ to talk to him, and those who didn’t – well, he never really gave them much thought.

Then again, Yurio was more like Yuuri, when it came to other people. Victor had not once seen him nurture an impersonal connection, never seen him talk to people just because they were there. He was either personally interested or not at all. Maybe, even more so than Yuuri, who, for all his reluctance to open up to others, had still tried to act friendly, when others had added him to the discussion.

Really, Victor couldn’t recall the last time he’d seen Yurio talk to someone outside of their training group ever since he’d come back to Russia. He would have asked if anything changed at school, had he not known the aggressive backlash he would get for it.

“We talk. We do,” he said now, some small kind of reassurance, were it considered genuine. “It’s just that sometimes we have to figure out  _ how _ .”

The poetics of it went unappreciated over Yurio’s head, who might as well have rolled his eyes as he muttered, “Idiots.” But, then, he pushed a plate of fully formed pelmeni in Victor’s hands – a plate which he really had no idea when it had come into existence – before picking up the rolling pin again. “Make yourself useful and boil these without killing us both.”

It was somewhere around their 9 th batch (Yurio insisted on only adding a few for every boiling round, so as not to let them stick together, and Victor’s pots weren’t the largest in the world, since he’d never expected them to get this much action in this lifetime), and after a few heated discussions about the local newscaster, when Victor decided to let Yurio have some quality time with his culinary masterpieces and anointed himself as the designated cleaner. It  _ was _ his kitchen, after all.

In that way coincidences work, therefore, he’d just deposited the bin bag in its rightful place, and was mildly disappointed by the fact that nobody had managed to fix a working light for the staircase yet, when Yuuri pushed open the entrance door and bundled it, together with a refreshed Makkachin. Victor looked at him, or at what he could see of him, with only the outside lamppost as a light source, and waited, hand on the railing, until Yuuri noticed him too – and, of course, Makkachin, whose eyesight was increasingly not what it used to be, so it took him another moment before he jumped on his legs.

“Oh, hi,” Yuuri said, an amused breath escaping him as Makkachin attempted to roll on his back right then and there, on the stairs at Victor’s feet.

“Hi,” Victor laughed too, petting Makkachin into submission and then into an upright position, even if he practically had to kneel down for it. “Good run?”

“Invigorating. The wind was really picking up, close to the river,” Yuuri said, allowing himself to pant just a bit. Victor smiled and, getting back to his feet, looked at his face, long enough for Yuuri to ask, “What is it?”

“You’re feeling okay?” Even in that lack of light, he caught Yuuri’s confused look, and then his nod. “Yurio was worried.” The confused look was back in full force, and Victor had to smile again, fondly exasperated, like he’d seen Yuuri look so many times. “You left without saying a word,” he explained.

It obviously caught Yuuri unawares, which was as much as Victor had expected. “Oh. Oh, I – didn’t even realise. I thought I did – ah, no, I was thinking about...and then I left, and when I got downstairs I wondered if I said something, but I  _ had _ intended to, so I thought I might have…”

His hands were anxiously running through his hair now, in his effort to remember, and Victor gently pulled them away. “Might have skipped a step in all that complicated sequence,” he said.

Hands focusing now on grasping Victor’s, Yuuri laughed a bit. “Yeah, I guess so. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. You’ll have to go through Yura’s vigorous talking-to now, though. He has very strong opinions about responsibility, these days,” he said, serious beneath his amused tone. “But he’s strangely like his grandfather, he gets in a better mood the more you eat.”

And Yuuri responded both to the seriosity and to the amusement, strengthening his hold just as he let out another breath of laughter, before the three of them took to the stairs. 

The stairwell of the building he’d been living in since he was twenty shouldn’t have felt like a liminal space, all things considered, but as they went up and up the steps, one working light winking on just as the one from the storey below winked off, Victor couldn’t help but feel like they were, temporarily, in a space outside of time. Quiet and dimly lit and perpetually moving, the only constant being Makkachin’s pattering feet and the hold they kept on each other’s hand.

So, it was maybe easier for Victor to say, “If you ever want to talk about it…,” here, halfway up to the top floor, than it would have been in his almost too well-lit apartment, where, apart from his voice, he would have had to say the same thing with his face, his eyes, his body language. It was easier, sometimes, just to be heard.

Yuuri squeezed his hand. “I – yeah. It’s kind of embarrassing to say anything, now. Because it’s nothing big, just – me being me. This wasn’t about that, anyway. I just got stuck thinking about some old routines I watched last night and what would have worked better with them,” he said, his voice doing the vocal equivalent of a dismissive hand motion. It took another moment. “But…do you want to know? What that problem was?”

Victor nodded.

“Okay, uh,” Yuuri grimaced, embarrassed, true to his word. “The short story?”

Victor nodded again.

Yuuri let out another, (this time falsely) amused laugh. “I’m afraid my mom is going to stuff me full of food when we go home.”

Victor had to blink, then process the unexpectedness of the affirmation, and then blink again. “And that’s a bad thing?” He was tempted to slow down. It was less than two floors to the last one now.

A pronounced sigh told him that Yuuri already wished he hadn’t said anything, but the good thing was that he was stubborn in everything he did. “It wouldn’t be, if only it didn’t stay right where she put it, for months afterwards.”

It seemed like Victor had miscalculated, and he needed even more time to process. When he finally did, though, there was only one short flight of stairs to their apartment door, and he stopped right in his tracks, disbelieving. “Yuuri!”

Yuuri almost snorted at his tone, which was rude, if endearing, but he had the decency to look away. Victor shook his hand a bit.

“Yuuri! Is this about –” But Victor couldn’t even continue. He had been so worried, and he hadn’t even realised until now. Not gently, he poked Yuuri’s side. When Yuuri only laughed, he poked him again.

“No, no, stop,” Yuuri said, trying to hold in his laughter, but Victor was on him now, for a few relishing moments of relentless tickling. “Unfair,” he eventually gasped, shaky with laughter, against Victor’s shoulder, and then hypocritically went for the most unfair things of all, by bringing his arms around Victor’s back and just pulling him into a hug.

“I can’t believe this,” Victor said, still somehow managing to put some bite into his words, but held him right back. “If she doesn’t make  _ katsudon _ a daily meal, I’ll take care of it  _ myself _ .”

“Please, don’t,” Yuuri said against his shoulder, with his own shaking. “Then I’ll really never get back in shape again.”

Experimentally, Victor poked his side again. He was stopped from tickling him even more thoroughly than before, like the adult he knew he was, only by the sound of Makkachin scrapping his paws against the door. Some things always had a higher priority.

Unlike Victor, Yuuri also had the decency to look adequately chastised when Yurio made a few off-hand comments about his running-off habits. It was also interesting to note that Yurio himself had trained his expressions into less overtly worried ones, even though he was not fooling Victor now. Yuuri, however, might have been just nice enough to actually miss it.

“These look nice,” he said, signing to the full bowl of pelmeni that had appeared on the dining table.

“They look like ugly, naked baby pigeons,”, Yurio said, annoyed and dismissive all at once. “The taste’s what’s important. Eat up.”

The tone was as authoritarian as Yakov’s when he asked them to redo their jumps. There was no going against it, even if they’d wanted to – which they didn’t. That day hadn’t been a particularly cooking-proficient one for either of them. So, they took their seats at the table as Yurio poured one of Victor’s unnecessarily fancy vinegars over the bowl and then mixed in the two cups of the yogurt he’d dredged from the archives of the fridge (in lack of any sour cream).

“I had a colleague in college who used to fry them,” Yuuri added, conversationally, as he accepted a plate from Yurio.

The same Yurio who scoffed at the statement. “Next you’re going to tell me to buy them from the supermarket.”

“Why not?” Victor asked, getting his own plate before it got out of his reach. “Even Nana would occasionally do that and we never felt any difference.” Yurio’s withering gaze was reward enough, and he turned to Yuuri with a conspiratorial grin. “Our Yurio’s a traditionalist.”

For a moment, it looked like Yurio was going to say something nasty back to him, but he appeared to change his mind at the last minute, take a plate of his own, and join them at the table. Then, when no argument seemed to arise, they finally dug in.

With his first mouthful, Victor was sent right down memory lane, and he took to staring at his kitchen cabinets and hanging lights above them as he walked around that mental road. It must have been his mother who had been making pelmeni in his childhood, the one brave enough to stand near the stove, but he thought it was his dad who had been filling and sticking them together beforehand. He remembered glimpses of Sunday meals, his grandparents or a few distant relatives helping out in the kitchen, gushing over the fresh sour cream his Nana had brought from the countryside the day before, tasting the occasional soup on the stove, checking the proving dough. It must have a holiday, for there to have been so many people.

Mostly, at the moment, he just remembered his dad overstuffing pelmeni, and his mother deploring the state they were in, when they kept opening up in the boiling water.

There were several calls he probably had to make.

“Did he tell you about that time some guide took them by some zoo at whatever competition and he got too close and a goat literally chewed a bunch of his hair?” Yurio said, at some point, breaking his idle reminiscing.

Yurio was talking to Yuuri, though, and it still took Victor a few more moments to realise what it was all about. “No, really?” Yuuri said, or at least tried to say, because soon enough he started laughing. “Oh! Oh, because—”

“—it was longer,” Yurio agreed, then smirked proudly at Victor’s horrified face.

“Yura, that was private!” he said, aghast. “Where did you ever hear that from?”

Instead of looking penitent, Yurio turned back to Yuuri. “The entire Junior division must have been there. Almost all of them sworn to secrecy, even after he had to cut off half his hair.”

“It was only a few centimetres, and we were  _ fourteen _ ,” Victor clarified, although Yuuri was clearly too busy being thoroughly amused to actually listen to him.

“Old enough to read a sign, I presume,” Yurio countered, almost too easily. Was Victor falling behind the new generation really that badly?

“Oh, God,” Yuuri fought for breath, and finally looked his way, eyes twinkling. “Did you cry?”

Victor was really falling behind the newer generations. He gaped. “I— _ of course _ not!” he said, without actually meaning to use that much gusto, and now it was both Yuuri and Yurio who were laughing. “Even if I did, you have no idea how scary that felt!”

It did nothing to diminish their laughter, but Yuuri did pat his leg comfortingly, a couple of times, so at least  _ he _ was trying. Then, it only took a few more moments for Victor to sketch his own smile, and then give in to their contagious laughter.

This self-amusement was another effect of having been around Yuuri this long. It was something that Victor, even as carefree as he’d tried to make himself look throughout the ages, had never really dared to try before. With Yuuri, it was a bit more complicated, as this particular kind of humour arched from self-deprecation, to stress-laughter, to easy amusement over things overcome – and Victor remembered when, during their first months of knowing each other, he had been unable to tell them apart. It had all seemed like various degrees of self-deprecation to him, which hit a bit too close to home, on his darker days, and on which territory he did not want to dwell.

But  _ this _ , Yuuri chuckling as he told Victor how he used to fall in the onsen when he was smaller, or him having to hold back a laugh when he remembered some embarrassing incident as a Junior, was something  _ good _ . It was like allowing himself to go easy on the less impeccable moments of his life, on those mistakes that he’d made, which weren’t as big as they had seemed at the time, and on how foolish he’d been to think anyone could be a textbook example of a person, in anything they did. It was an easier intake of breath, and he was learning.

It didn’t mean, however, that he deplored those strands of hair any less now, over a dozen years and haircuts later. Those animals had been ferocious.

“I heard he’d wanted to sue them,” Yurio went on, once they had more or less regained their breath, only to lose it again.

“I did not,” Victor said swiftly.

Yuuri wiped a bit at his eye. “Yuuko and I used to joke that you’d insured your hair, but that was a bit drastic, Vitya,” he said, and Victor thought he would never get tired of hearing him say his name. “Those poor animals…” he continued, though, spoiling it.

“Vicious,” Victor corrected him.

“I mean, most people would first focus on finding some support system…”

Here, however, most intriguingly, Yurio snorted. “Like when you went around hugging everybody after the Rostelecom?”

There was a still silence which enveloped the room as the grin left Yuuri’s face and he turned a horrified gaze towards Yurio. “Yura, he needn't know that. Think of his growing ego.”

The tone and content seemed to chastise Yurio quite thoroughly, as he now looked a bit horrified himself. “Shit, you're right.”

Victor didn’t care about any of that. His eyes had been shining, grin too wide for words, ever since he’d heard the best part of the conversation. “Huh? What’s this about a support system and hugging people?” He leant a bit into Yuuri’s space. “Did you miss me? Yuuri, why, I hadn’t been away for more than a day!”

On the background, he dimly heard Yurio groaning with the responsibility of what he’d done. Up close, however, he got to see Yuuri looking flustered, for the second time in two weeks, and that was reward enough, no matter how many jibes they had at him.


	6. June

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Nobody believed it possible, but here it is, the final installment. Lost momentum sometime after the last chapter, then got tangled in other projects, so this was kinda, very, postponed. I probably left quite a number of "plot" lines hanging with this, but it was either this or leaving it forever unfinished (or, who knows, maybe when the movie comes out, my inspiration will return from war, but that's too far away still). So, I hope I did a decent (average?) job with this. This was planned to have a 3rd part too (obviously, with all the holiday allusions), but I can't promise that that will get done too.
> 
> Anyway! Thank you for reading and I hope you enjoyed this, at least a little :). Had I known this thing would get to have almost 50k words, I would have probably invested some brain matter into coming up with an actual plot, but what can you do?
> 
> In this final part, Victor makes this: [✪](http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/food-network-kitchen/roasted-zucchini-flatbread-with-hummus-arugula-goat-cheese-and-almonds-recipe-2105983)  
> and then Yuuri and Victor make this: [✪](http://www.myrecipes.com/recipe/asparagus-morel-quiche)  
> (although with a different crust, to spare my and Yuuri's feelings)

“You know that Lilia wants you as a trainee instructor over the summer months?”

“I know,” Yuuri said, flipping lazily through the various holiday pamphlets they had gathered from various agencies. “I mean, she’s been strongly suggesting it, mostly by always talking as if I already said I would, so…”

Victor hummed, daring to take one of Yuuri’s weird fruits from the full bowl he had taken with him to the couch. “She was very displeased with my wish to whisk you away, when I tried to break the news to her.”

Yuuri looked up. “You want to whisk me away to my own home?”

“Well, certain people would say that you’re the type to need actual whisking away to visit your relatives, otherwise who knows how many years you’ll go without visiting,” Victor said, then popped the thing in his mouth, and grimaced.

“I don’t see why you keep doing that to yourself,” Yuuri said, completely unimpressed.

Victor bravely gave it a couple more chews before finally, mercifully, swallowing. “I could say the same back to you.”

Yuuri shrugged and exchanged his pamphlet for another before melting even more into the couch. “I quite like them. I used them in college to feel less hungry.”

Cogitating, Victor tested the lingering citrusy taste in his mouth. Then, he blinked and turned towards Yuuri, still very much sprawled on their small couch. “Are you hungry?”

Looking at him over the page, Yuuri frowned. “No…?” It sounded rather defensive, too.

Victor was undeterred, especially since he knew their kitchen needed restocking. “I found this recipe for mushroom bruschettas. I could go down the street and get some of those portobellos you were eyeing lovingly the other day, and then —”

But Yuuri was already kicking his legs in his general direction, essentially ruining his train of thought. “Shut up, shut up!”

From his more advantageous position as somebody not currently lying down on a couch, Victor caught his socked feet and pressed them to his own chest. “You _are_ hungry!”

“I’m not,” Yuuri persisted. “Let go.”

Victor did not say _Make me_ , and he was pretty sure his smile was doing it for him, although he was pretty proud of his restraint. Several moments later, when Yuuri’s glower had thawed a bit, he continued. “With some goat cheese and tomatoes, maybe mixed with a little bit of garlic…”

Yuuri groaned, which only made Victor grin even more. “Fine, let’s go to the store.”

Victor let go of his feet in the end, as a small mercy, and Yuuri rolled his way off the couch. After staring for a moment, Victor realised he was wearing a pair of _his_ sweatpants. It was hard to tell, these days. Their clothes had got more and more mixed up with every laundry day that passed.

Still, he felt rejuvenated by the promise of making afternoon brunches together. “I promise to use the minimal amount of butter, this time.”

“None,” Yuuri decreed, kneeling down to pet Makkachin’s tummy. Victor had to share one fleeting look of resigned fondness with his dog.

 

“Minako is moving to Fukuoka,” Yuuri told him, as they made their way to the store. The day was warm, sunny, and perfect. Victor was glad it was their day off, and even more glad that they had managed to pry themselves off their respective couch and bedroom.

“How so?” he asked. The last time he’d heard of her, she’d been scolding Yuuri about not being more excited about his assigned semi-part-time job with Lilia, in a vociferous Japanese that Victor had been surprised to understand a third of.

Yuuri moved his hand around for effect. “She said, if you can decide to move and change your whole life overnight _and_ get out of it in one piece, why shouldn’t she? She would find more students in a bigger city, that’s for sure.”

“I’m surprised it’s not Tokyo,” Victor said. “Or Paris.”

“One step at a time, I guess,” Yuuri said, with an amused shrug. “Easiest way not to fall.”

Victor glanced at him, surreptitiously. “Your life motto?”

This time, Yuuri huffed with dry humour. “I thought it was pretty obvious that I did fall pretty hard, actually.”

At first, Victor turned to him, thinking he was making another self-deprecating joke, but when he saw Yuuri’s smile, he had to smile too and lightly swipe at his arm. “Flirt.”

Yuuri laughed and leant away for a moment, but the next he edged back and brushed their shoulders together. For a while, they walked in silence, and Yuuri must have been eyeing the lush tree leaves along the street too, because after a few minutes he said, “Do you want to go to the park?”

There was no Makkachin with them, since their initial plans had only included a relatively short walk to the closest grocery store, but instead of suggesting going back first, Victor just nodded. “Okay, it’s around there,” he pointed in the general direction of an adjacent array of streets.

“I know,” Yuuri said, just the slightest bit of miffed pride in his voice, and Victor couldn’t blame him. Yuuri had been remarkably fast at learning his surroundings, even from his first weeks there.

This was a great plan, anyway.

“And what are we going to say to the tabloids horrified to see Victor Nikiforov walking in sweatpants in broad daylight?” he asked, playfully, when they were making their way along a narrow and quiet street.

“We are going to say,” Yuuri started carefully, looking at the geraniums blooming on people’s windowsills. “That after taking off his last suit, Victor Nikiforov said that he wasn’t going to wear another one willingly until his wedding day, and possibly not even then.”

Victor hummed in agreement. “If I could marry you in sweatpants and a borrowed T-shirt, you know I would.”

Yuuri paused, presumably to gather the few thoughts that still managed to get scrambled at various things Victor said, but, to his credit, it only took a few moments. “Technically,” he afterwards continued in a suspiciously casual manner, “it isn’t written anywhere that you can’t.”

Victor laughed and pressed himself against his side. “Marry me in onsen yukatas, it will be the best advertising!” He kissed Yuuri’s temple once he felt the first peals of laughter grip him.

“And nobody will be able to publish any sneak pictures because of the product placement, it’s genius.” Yuuri added, along with his laughter.

It was fun to talk it now and here, when there have been no new articles since a few weeks after the season ended, as it usually happened, and where they hadn’t been that stalked to begin with, but Yuuri had admitted one evening that he dreaded going back home for nationals in autumn, when he’d suddenly find himself back in the spotlight.

Victor was fighting a constant war between the wish for everybody to see his worth and the wish for them to remain in their lovely, cosy, domestic bubble. They had a few more months to indulge in that bubble whenever they weren’t practicing, though, and they’d have to make that enough.

“I don’t think I can express how much I don’t care, though,” Yuuri said after a while, not somber, but honest, and directed an open smile Victor’s way. “What you’d wear, I mean. As long as you’re _actually_ dressed,” he actually frowned for a moment, “anything is fine.”

“You could’ve at least let me envision a nude wedding for a few minutes before destroying my dreams,” Victor said, with absolutely no attempt to sound either serious or upset. Yuuri smiled. “But I would, too,” Victor eventually admitted. “I would've probably married you even if you were wearing that horrible tie, had we not disposed of it last year.”

Without doing the extra effort of looking Victor’s way, Yuuri raised a hand to his heart. “Touching.”

Victor wanted to nudge him and lament over how cute he used to be back when Victor had first come to Hasetsu, when he still got starry eyed whenever they found themselves in a conversation, with almost no sarcastic comebacks — but he didn't. Because, even more than that, he loved Yuuri as he was now, openly funny and talkative when he wanted to be, brooding and gloomy at times, and at other times still softly starry eyed when he spoke to Victor, even after getting to know as many of his bad parts as of his good ones. It was an unreliable opinion, but Victor thought that there was hardly any need to even claim that he himself didn't usually look at Yuuri that way too.

 

There were mornings Victor woke up to the feeling of Yuuri pressing all his weight to his back, draped over him like the world’s most secure thermal blanket. There were utterly lovely mornings, especially with the chill that descended over Saint Petersburg,  after every mildly serious storm, seeping in their widely-windowed apartment so much that Victor was glad to find himself having trouble breathing, because it was always something accompanied by Yuuri’s steady warmth.

These were the sweet counterpart to the equally sweet, warmer mornings, when Victor would toss and turn in their suddenly too wide bed, searching for Yuuri’s body until he found it, and then groggily pulling him to his chest, arm all around him and face in his hair, like the large koala Yuuri had taught him to be (by example, mostly). As he lay there now, face pressed to his pillow, arms useless, somewhere under it, and he himself equally useless, under Yuuri, stomach fluttery as he felt him sleepily nuzzle his neck, Victor spared a moment to wonder how their mornings in Hasetsu were going to be now.

All throughout last year, they’d never got to the point where they could be as relaxed as they were now around each other, not enough to do anything more than occasionally share Victor’s wide bed and revel in the feel of somebody else being so close, and so tangible. Victor could remember a few instances, when they must have drifted towards each other in the night, somewhere close to their last stay there, and he would wake with Yuuri’s face pressed to his shoulder, arms loosely circled around Victor’s,  or times when he’d unawarely thrown an arm around Yuuri’s chest as they slept. But now — he wondered where they’d be now.

“Makkachin...” Victor sighed into his pillow, which took some effort.

“Mm, no...the second one,” Yuuri answered, getting more comfortable, and it was wonderful to feel his lips move over his skin as he worded that out. Victor wanted to make him talk more — or, well, whatever it took.

“Should’ve known,” he mumbled. “Less curly.” Which earned him a half-hearted kick from Yuuri’s legs.

“I’ll fetch you the far superior alternative then, shall I?” Yuuri muttered, and — yes, his warm breath on the back on Victor’s neck was an amazing thing.

And, although he made no move to go, Victor still did the herculean task of extracting an arm from under his pillow and reaching with it for whatever part of Yuuri he could get to. It ended up being his hand, curled around Victor’s shoulder. “Nooo. No, no no,” Victor said, quickly. “You’ll stay right here.” He patted his hand. “Right where you are. No leaving.”

For a moment, Yuuri did make it look like he was going to push himself off Victor’s back, but after a second he just pressed himself more firmly to it, with a sigh so profound that it warmed Victor’s core. “Never leaving,” he said, and Victor took it as a promise.

 

The atmosphere at the rink was palpably more airy already. Victor stood off to one side, gloved hands on his hips, and thought about quadruple axels. Yurio was becoming quite good at them. Watching him, Victor did a mental exercise (no doubt where he got _that_ from), and prodded the idea that the upcoming season would be his last.

He’d been sofly testing it in his head for the past, well, months, if not year. It had been sharp and painful and bloody at first, but lately he’d found that the thought no longer left him gasping for metaphorical (or not) air; it still hurt, quite a lot, but dully, in the way that bruises or his grandma’s bones did. It was a pain that came from deep within, but which was no longer able to pierce his skin, tear him apart from inside out, turn him into trembling ribbons of the person he once was.

Idly, he wondered whether this was what hope felt like.

 

> “It’s what future financial stability feels like,” Yakov had gruntled, when Victor had somehow mentioned it to him, and Victor had _laughed_ , and failed to understand. “It’s what happens when you realise you have more than one career to go through in your life,” Yakov had explained, and then, as if it pained him, “You didn’t do such a bad job as a coach. You might have something there.”
> 
> The sheer simplicity of the compliment had left Victor gaping. Then, a breath later, “I still _am_ a coach!” he’d yelled after Yakov, only to be thoroughly ignored.

“Penny for your thoughts, Viten’ka,” Mila sing-songed as she skated closer to him. “Thought you’d finally give Yakov’s order that we take even breaks a try?”

Victor smiled. “Not quite,” and he indicated Yurio, going through the last segment of what would one day be his free skate.

“Still graceful, isn’t he?” Mila asked. “He’s taking all these body changes and growth spurts way better than you did, doesn’t he?”

“How would you know, you weren’t even born then,” Victor smoothly answered to her gentle jab, and they both snickered to themselves.

“Eyeing the competition, I see.” This was Georgi, and didn’t it always use to be like this, the two of them, and then three, when Mila joined too, having deemed her just older enough than the rest on the team to take their breaks together and — frankly, if Victor was honest — just gossip. It felt positively nostalgic.

“I’m displaying pure professional interest here,” Victor said cooly, and crossed his arms as he went on watching Yurio’s last spins.

“ _Oh_ ,” Mila and Georgi said at once, which was never a precursor to anything good. “Yes, that renowned Nikiforov professional interest, _of course_ ,” Mila continued.

“Remember when the Grand Prix was held in Turin, many years ago, and you told me to cover for you while you went to see Piazza San Carlo? _Tell Yakov it’s out of professional interest_ , you said,” Georgi joined her, good-humoredly.

Not yet deigning them with a look, Victor bit his cheek. “I did nothing of the sort.”

“Right, you probably just told me to come up with something and took off,” Georgi nodded, and Mila started laughing, which earned them the vague attention of the rest of the people who were sharing the rink and not currently practicing death spins. Sadly, this also meant Yuuri and Yurio, until now blissfully out of earshot.

“Oh, I remember one too,” Mila said, when she’d regained her composure. “Canada, three years ago, when you pleaded with me to take you to meet the hockey team. _Professional interest_ , you said, I’m sure!”

This time, Victor levelled her with a steady gaze. “You can find no proof that it wasn’t.”

“Oh, I don’t think we need to go that far back,” Georgi said, and before Victor could anticipate his next move, he watched and listened in horror as Georgi addressed Yuuri, how having edged a bit closer with them, along with a visibly curious Yurio. “Yura, did Vitya at _any point_ ,” he had to stop here, and swallow down a peal of laughter, but it didn’t last enough for Victor to be able to push him to the other end of the rink. “Did he ever say the words _professional interest_ to you, all of last year?”

Yuuri, bless his soul, looked bemused, as he glanced between them. His eyes landed on Victor, and he frowned, just a bit. “You _did_ , didn’t you? When you were telling me about presentation points in the onsen.”

There was a moment of silence, on Victor’s part, which was soon followed by Mila and Georgi’s rambunctious laughter, and which Victor tried to ignore.

“What the hell,” Yurio said, and finally his young age came to Victor’s advantage, since all he needed now was _another_ person to judge him. Not bothering to say anything, Victor gave Yuuri an apologetic look.

Yuuri, however, soon proved unworthy of said apology, since after another few moments of blinking at Mila and Georgi, his eyes lit up in that otherwise very charming fashion of his, but which now was utterly devastating, since Victor knew that it meant he’d figured it out.

Most certainly, since Yuuri looked at him again, a soft, but equally devastating smile on his lips. “Also when you laid down on top of me to make me take a nap, right?”

“Oh, God,” Georgi said, amid thoroughly unexplainable laughter.

“Tell us more,” Mila beseeched.

“Fuck, please don’t,” Yurio said, a kindred spirit in time of need.

But Yuuri was still smiling, adjusting his fingerless gloves in yet another devastating manner. “Well, there was also—”

“Yuuri, _please_ ,” Victor finally surrendered, pleading.

“Are you getting _married_ out of professional interest too?” his traitorous teammates asked, almost crying with laughter now.

 _Of course_ , Victor almost wanted to say. “You're all uninvited to my wedding,” he declared instead. “Except for Yurio, since he’s the —”

Yurio was already glaring daggers at him. “If you say ‘flower boy’, I will skate there and strangle you with my bootlaces, so the only thing I will bring flowers to will be your funeral.”

“— ringbearer,” Victor finished, and blinked at him. “But that was a very nicely structured sentence, Yurio. All that extra writing practice is paying off, I'm really proud.”

Yuuri nodded in agreement.

It only seemed to make Yurio seethe more, which — okay, Victor had to admit it now, was a bit entertaining. Mila and Georgi chose to chuckle at that too, behind their respective hands, however, so they soon earned a share of Yurio’s annoyance for themselves. From beside him, and now looking less smug and more serious, Yuuri skated closer.

“...We're not really getting new rings, right?” he asked, fretting his ring finger through the glove. “I still have a couple installments left to pay for the ones we have now.”

And he seemed actually, if mildly, concerned, which only made the others laugh louder, and Victor to look at the ceiling and let out a small, if forlorn, sigh. He might have been looking forward to having a more heavily engraved pair, but Yuuri — deep down, in something he hadn’t yet voiced out — was right. The rings they had now had already a deep sentimental value (Victor ignored the financial one, as Yuuri had already instructed him to do a few thousand times, whenever he offered to contribute).

“No, these are lovely,” he said with an unforced smile, after he’d finished sighing at the ceiling. Inexplicably, Yuuri didn’t look convinced.

“You’ll have no choice, that idiot will probably lose his in one of your baths when you go there,” Yurio offered from behind, already skating away.

 _Oh, dear_. Victor hadn’t thought of that, lately.

 

“Yuuri, I think we should invest in very sturdy necklaces,” Victor told Yuuri, after he’d spent the better part of the last two days coming up with the solution.

Yuuri was busy dusting their bookshelves, but at Victor’s statement, his eyes darted towards him — and then, inexplicably, to Victor’s hands, currently manually shredding some goat’s cheese in a bowl, as if his first explanation had been that Victor had somehow lost one or more of his fingers and wanted to go all _Ancient Mariner_ about it.

“How so?” he asked, when that turned out not to be the case.

“I’m gonna want to spend the rest of my life in your parents’ onsen, and I’m afraid Yurio’s prophecy will come true and I’ll end up losing my ring there at some point,” he explained, pain and anguish sensibly lading his tone.

“Ah,” Yuuri said. He went back to dusting. “Mom will hold on to them if you don’t trust yourself.”

“ _Still_ ,” Victor huffed, to hide the fact that the alternative didn’t cross his mind, and went to check the zucchini slices currently roasting in the oven. “It has emotional value, I don’t want to risk it.”

He’d almost cried, when it happened. Or, rather, he’d almost cried _later_ , when he became fully aware of what had happened to him, to his _life_ , but not in the actual moment when Yuuri had put the ring on his finger, when he’d only been aware of Yuuri’s scrunched eyebrows, his soft voice and even softer blush, and of the way he looked at Victor, so tentative but decisive, his hands shaking, but not letting go.

It was the moment Victor had realised he was going to cry, maybe on multiple occasions, in the times to come, and that it wasn’t going to be a bad thing.

“I think we can both agree I’m emotional enough on my own to make up for several pairs of lost rings,” Yuuri said, in the muttered quasi-monotone that always had Victor snickering, so he didn’t bother to tell him how wrong he was, in that moment. By this point, Victor was just a high-functioning, lovesick, emotional mess.

“Even so,” he said, but let the subject drop as something more important came up. “What do you think, more lemon or less?”

Yuuri glanced at the place where Victor was brooding over the food processor. “More, I’d say. Phichit squeezed an entire lemon in when he made it, I think.”

Adding garlic over the skinned chickpeas, Victor frowned. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We’re far from being on his level.”

“Hubris, huh?” Yuuri said, grin palpable in his voice, and Victor scoffed. “Never thought I’d have more of it than you.”

Since nobody was watching, Victor added two full spoons of tahini, instead of the recommended one and a half, but only because they’d halved the olive oil before. Before turning the blender on, however, he stared a bit at Yuuri, just to see if he was even a bit self-aware with regards to what he was saying. It seemed like not.

“ _Please_ ,” Victor said, in that case. “I spent most part of last year in awe of how much pride could be contained in such a small vessel.”

This time, it was Yuuri’s time to scoff. “I don’t have that much... _pride_.”

He said it like he’d never heard the word before. Victor added a pinch of salt to the still unblended ingredients, and turned to look at him.

“What?” Yuuri asked, persisting in his cleaning duties, even as he directed more and more incredulous glances Victor’s way.

Victor crossed his arms.

“ _What_?” and this time it was edged with confused laugher, as Yuuri twisted the dishcloth in his hands.

Victor smiled.

“You’re ridiculous,” Yuuri shook his head and turned to deal with something more trustworthy, like the coffee table. “I’m not _proud_ .” He seemed to think about it, though, as he gathered the glasses left there since morning. “I mean, not as a _character trait_.”

Not before letting out an indulgent, unfooled hum, Victor put the blender to work. He mixed it three times, with the sensible pauses to check the texture, perhaps more seriously than he would have done, had Yuuri not been boring holes into his back as he busied himself with cleaning the glasses. What was next? He’d (manageably) chopped the almonds earlier, they had some fresh, store-bought greens at hand, and the cheese was decently shredded in a wooden bowl.

Right. Victor went to check the cupboards for the pita bread he remembered buying earlier that week, and maybe (just maybe) nudged his hips  into Yuuri’s more than he actually needed as he did so. The best part was that Yuuri replied in kind, rather good-humoredly, for all their banter. Victor decided he never wanted to have a bigger kitchen. This was quite enough for all his wishes and needs.

“What’s left?” Yuuri asked, after he’d dried his hands on a towel.

“Hmm,” Victor analysed the bag of flatbread before tearing it open. “Not much, actually, we just have to take these out,” he tapped the zucchini-filled oven with a socked foot, “and warm this up a bit,” he shook the pita bread, “and then it’s done.”

“ _Lunch_ ,” Yuuri said, wistfully, and Victor replied with a whole-hearted nod. “I’ll transfer the hummus to a more dignified vessel, container, then.”

Victor left him to it and exchanged the bread with the tray of zucchini slices, putting one in after taking the other out, and then leaving the latter to cool while he cleaned the (remarkably little) mess he’d done on the countertop. Only when he saw Yuuri raise a spoon to his mouth did he realise he had yet to taste any of these things.

He watched, enraptured, as Yuuri swallowed without giving any feedback or any attention to him at all, to be fair. “Let me guess,” Victor said after a moment passed, wanting both of these things. “Missed the salt?”

Yuuri shook his head, dipping the spoon in the bowl once more. “No, you got it right. Here.” Victor leant to taste it too, and discovered that it was, indeed, good. “Congrats, Vitya,” Yuuri said, with a cheeky grin, probably sparked by Victor’s genuine surprise.

“Got it right,” Victor grinned at him too. “Are you _proud_?”

With a scoff, Yuuri rolled his eyes, although he was exceptionally failing at holding back a smile. Victor’s grin widened, and his kitchen experience must have finally started to register, because he had the mind to go turn off the oven before he started smothering Yuuri’s face in kisses, enjoying his breathy laughter until Yuuri slid one of his hands from Victor’s back to his neck, and kissed him and kissed him until Victor would have been perfectly happy not to walk out of his kitchen even again for as long as he lived.

 

Yuuri _was_ proud, unexpectedly so for Victor when he’d first met him. It was a sort of dignified pride that had grown so sharp that it was physically and mentally hurting him, when everything he did, every moment he skated, was coated in the overbearing thought of _I could do more_ . That’s why, it had been so strange, at first, to hear Yuuri say _I can’t do that_ , because even as he said it, there was in his eyes the scream that he _could_ , that he was better than whatever was happening to him right then.

 _I lack confidence_ , Yuuri had told him, when Victor had asked not why he couldn’t, but why he _wasn’t_ doing what he needed to do to win. And maybe that was it.

In time, Yuuri had got used to think of himself as someone lacking the confidence he so sorely needed for his programmes, but even that, and it was obvious once someone understood, hadn’t managed to eat away the dignity that he stubbornly held onto in his heart of hearts, no matter what the rest of his heart said. He knew, undeniably, that he could do better, but he was never certain that he could _in that moment_ , when it mattered. It was a self-awareness and self-doubt that tore at him, bit by bit, for years, until he no longer saw even the moments in which he had been able to do something quite admirable.

But that dignity and that pride had persisted, even so, and it was an even more extraordinary thing when Victor saw him say _I can do this, and more_ , and then actually do just _that_ , and so much more. It lit up his whole face, his whole being, the first time that persistent thought proved helpful, rather than paralysing. Really, Victor couldn’t have helped kissing him then, painful fall on ice notwithstanding.

 

“You always believe you’ll be even better than you are right now,” Victor told him, late that night, after some more prodding on Yuuri’s part. “That’s one half of the most important thing,” he said, searching under the blanket for Yuuri’s hand, and threading their fingers together. The next part, he couldn’t have voiced out loud years before. “The second half is to understand just how good you are right now.”

Yuuri let out a soft breath. “Didn’t I tell you something like that before?” He might have.

“You might have.”

“Did you believe me?” Yuuri asked, holding his hand more firmly.

Victor had to be honest. “I did.” A look from Yuuri. “I _did_ , I started to, it’s a learning process.” He huffed, falling back down on his pillow. “I’m getting better at it.” He was.

“You are.”

Yuuri then took another deep breath, but it wasn’t incipient to anything bad, or distressed. It was just that. A breath of fresh air, after something was understood and passed over.

His profile was so comforting and right in the dim moonlight, Victor thought he might just fall asleep looking at him, aware of how close he was and how safe they were in the space they had created for themselves, slowly and carefully, until Victor could walk backwards through his mental map and not bump into any sharp corners. He didn’t get to, though, not quite, as after a while Yuuri’s grasp on his hand tightened, and he tightened his back, and watched him. And Yuuri let out another soft breath, and turned to him, and Victor was surrounded by soft fabric and warmth, and he clung on so tightly, with a strength that didn’t permeate into their kisses, which were soft and light like sleeping sand.

 

There were mornings Victor woke up to the feeling of Yuuri pressing all his weight to his back, draped over him like the world’s most secure thermal blanket, but there were also nights when Yuuri would roll and pull Victor on top of him, thus making him both less likely to get a concussion and freer to press Yuuri back into his pillows every time he rose to steal another kiss while the only thing Victor wanted to do was _look_ at him. This wasn’t like those times, however, since Victor had been in no danger of bumping into the bedframe again, and since he only got a few scattered kisses along his jaw before Yuuri started pressing him closer, and closer, until Victor, really, had no need to hold himself up on his elbows anymore.

“Creative take on asphyxiation,” Victor said, half-amused, just before Yuuri held him even tighter and he saw himself needing to lay his whole weight on top of him. “You okay?”

But Yuuri only hummed agreement into his shoulder, arms now looser around Victor’s torso. “This is good,” he muttered, since that was probably all he could do by this point.

“Is it?” Victor asked, and took advantage of his position as a very long blanket to start nuzzling Yuuri’s neck, which only earned him another content sigh.

“Quite,” Yuuri said, and Victor got more comfortable in his octopus position, hugging him as he was hugged back, for as long as they had to. And if at some point Yuuri’s hands started trailing those lovely patterns on Victor’s back, under his shirt, then that made it all just that much better.

 

Then, there were also mornings like these: cold, clean light streaming into their bedroom in generous amounts, filtered into patterns by the thin drapes Victor had bought at the beginning of the summer months, the cries of seagulls a familiar sound outside the big windows, one of which has been left ajar at some point, letting crisp air slither into the room, and the sounds of the city somewhere beneath them, too dull to be considered a threat to their harmony.

Victor hadn’t realised he hadn’t been _living_ in his home until he’d started to. The morning was so lovely that not even his aching feet and various muscles and bruises couldn’t break him out of it, so he turned and sank his face into the colder midsts of an unused pillow, arms crossed under it, and let himself savour the feeling of this morning fully.

Yet, he was alone, which was unfortunate, so he listened very carefully, until he could make out Makkachin’s paws in the living room and, along with that, some quiet shuffling and clinking of plates, which must have come from the kitchen. Victor sighed into the pillow, now warm, and finally pushed himself up.

“What happened to your morning person routine?” Yuuri greeted him with amusement, once Victor dragged his feet into the living room.

“Flew away with the wind once I realised next week we’re on holiday,” Victor said, and crouched down to welcome a happy Makkachin into his arms.

Amidst such enthusiastic dog-washings of his face, it was a miracle he still heard Yuuri’s wistful sigh. “We are, aren’t we?” And a soft laugh, as he leant over something Victor couldn’t see on one of the kitchen counters. “I think I almost didn’t believe we’d get this far.”

“I don’t know if I did, either, but I certainly hoped so.” Victor ruffled Makkachin’s hair to get him to lay off his face, and then followed that with a good belly rub, to fully sate him. The whole room smelt faintly, wonderfully like herbs and roasted vegetables. “What are you making?”

“Technically, breakfast,” Yuuri said, looking uncertainly into a bowl, one hand mixer in his hand. “But I prefer to call it brunch, it makes me feel better.” He looked up as Victor, having left Makkachin reclaim the bed, took a few steps in his direction. “If you want to help, wash your hands.”

Victor raised said hands in surrender, and turned on his heel towards the bathroom (cringing only inwards at the unnecessary foot pain he was causing himself). He went through the whole morning routine, in fact, so that there would be no possible reasons to be ushered away again. There was something terribly magnetic about Yuuri, hair tousled and glasses low on his nose, poring attentively over their future breakfast.

But what greeted him, when he returned, was a bowl of weird sponges floating in slightly murky water. “Wash these for me one more time?” Yuuri said, with a smile so lovely that Victor found himself accepting the bowl.

He edged his way into the kitchen area and looked at his workload for a few more moments. “And… what are these, exactly?”

“Morels,” Yuuri said, holding a saucepan under the tap for a little while before setting it on the cooker. “They’re good, you’ll probably like them.”

“Probably,” Victor said, blinking at them, and then submerged his hands in the water and attempted to clean them as best as he could.

Close by, Yuuri occupied himself with trimming some asparagus, which Victor personally thought was a much better task for him than dealing with strange sponges he hadn’t interacted with before, but he wasn’t going to give away some of his hard-earned responsibility. He did, however, nudge his hip into Yuuri’s when he was done snapping asparagus stalks in two, because where was the fun in not doing that. With a smile, Yuuri nudged him right back, but immediately afterwards went to add the stalks to the simmering water.

There was some shredded cheese in a small bowl close at hand, and a second, bigger bowl with an egg-and-milk concoction, but Yuuri didn’t go to either of those next, but crouched beside the oven, checking the temperature.

“Are we baking?” Victor asked, because the concept fascinated him.

Yuuri got up and swiftly took the saucepan off the cooker (couldn’t have been more than a minute since he’d added the stalks, which once again was fascinating), drained the contents in a sieve over the sink, and dumped the asparagus in cold water.

“Yes,” he said, after the thirty seconds that it had taken him to do all that. He glanced at Victor and at the sponges he was still fondling. “Squeeze the liquid out of the mushrooms, please. Gently,” he whispered, before going to the fridge.

Victor was left staring down at his hands. “These are _mushrooms_?”

“Of course,” Yuuri said, frowning, as he pulled a tart pan complete with crust from the upper shelf. “What did you think they were?”

“Weird, spongy amphibians?” Victor tried, but he was just a bit awestruck. “When did you have time to make _that_?”

“Woke up very early,” Yuuri grinned, placing the pan beside the other bowls.

Victor frowned and squeezed the life-juice out of the few mushrooms he’d had to wash, and then followed Yuuri’s instructions as to how he was supposed to cut them, and then was ushered to drain the asparagus once more and bring it over. Meanwhile, Victor stole glances at Yuuri pushing the crust in a more perfected form, where it had sagged, and then sprinkling the cheese and some finely cut green onions on top of it. It was a miracle in the making, and by the time Victor was done with his tasks, Yuuri had already started placing the mushrooms on the crust too, which Victor was all too happy to help him with, adding thin asparagus stalks in between them.

Then Yuuri poured the egg mixture on top of it all, and it fit snugly in the available space, and Victor beamed. “We could open a café.”

Yuuri snorted, even as he was sliding the quiche into the oven. “As if,” he said, and then got back to his feet and fixed Victor with a serious look. “This is a one-time occurrence. I spent one hour looking for a healthy but edible crust recipe.”

“Let’s keep it as a retirement plan, anyway,” Victor said, undeterred, wiping the remains of vegetables off his hands. “Second retirement, obviously.”

“That’s the most optimistic lifespan I’ve had predicted in a while,” Yuuri said, with a devastating little grin, as he watched Victor with his arms crossed.

Dutifully, Victor did lean in to kiss it off his face, but only for an instant, using all his strength to pull back quick enough to see Yuuri’s eyes flutter open again in surprise, see the softness of his features in that moment and the quiet longing that Victor himself still felt, almost constantly. He knew that it would thaw, in time, fade and turn into something warm and content, but for now, this was still all so very new, it would continue to surprise them and catch them unawares for a long while yet, and it was as exciting as it was frightening as it was wonderful.

Then Yuuri, with an amused smile now, raised a hand to Victor’s face, and it was just the slightest bit cold, and how could it not be, after all that hard work with cold water and chilled pans, but then he ran his thumb slowly over Victor’s lip, and all Victor could feel was warmth. So, when Yuuri kissed him, he gave himself just a few moments to enjoy this, the feeling of being kissed, before leaning into him too, maybe with a bit too much gusto, since Yuuri gasped a laugh against his lips, but still so utterly, utterly rewarding.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> P.S.: Thank you in advance, Didi, for vaguely proofreading this thing, when you have time.


End file.
